“... But since practising Anglicans have come to form only a tiny minority of Britons, the Church may well soon be disestablished. This would compromise the religious role of the monarchy which is part of its charisma. Future British monarchs might – just – be able still to be crowned to Handel’s anthem ‘And Zadok the Priest ... anointed Solomon ...”

“... on this issue, no doubt, as feminists did on the other one. The food in the head industry may be an insult to the Third World, but it also encourages contribution to aid programmes. No longer guilty about sex, we are uneasy about anorexia and bulimia, slimness and fatness, soft foodie dreaming ... Vice may pay its ...”

“... With whom? Certainly not foreign visitors, who found the advertisements very bizarre. Some may suppose that they were designed to captivate the man who enjoys the pin-up in his tabloid paper over a cuppa or a pint in a smoky café or pub, but he might have found the glib parody of Surrealism bewildering – the Indian fertility goddess blended with the ...”

“... as one of the advantages of a nepotistical system. The author is a little puzzled, as the reader may well be, to know why so many Lyall dependents looked to ‘Uncle William’ for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the ...”

“... will begin to be adopted by the end of the century; and a common foreign and security policy may in time lead to a common European defence. No wonder, perhaps, that die-hards in Britain blanched at the Maastricht agreement – and that the British Government came home brandishing its two ‘opt-out’ clauses, one on the common currency, the other on the ...”

“... of its demotic succulence? In one sense, certainly, the language and the life he wrote of may still be alive, in New York and in other places: but the kind of Jewishness – incarnate in speech and spirit, in herring and onion roll – where Singer’s characters reside seems a long way either from modern America or from modern Israel, or from the ...”

“... class in the political struggle for its own emancipation. Cohen anticipates that his own position may meet with criticisms of this kind. The assertion of the primacy of productive forces is, he notes, considered demeaning to humanity… Those who take this line stigmatise the thesis as ‘technological determinism’, and complain that it presents machinery ...”

“... projects and less on public-sector wage claims. This relative convergence of opinion may break apart again if Michael Heseltine or his busload of City gents fail to find sufficient sovereigns to spare from their pots of gold. The temporary consensus against arming the Police with water cannons, CS gas and rubber bullets ...”

“... In one of several investigative reports on the topic, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr wrote in May 2017 that ‘what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can ...”

“... consist of ‘the usual captionless pictures of the government busy at work’. The mise-en-scène may be modest science fiction, but the mode is self-conscious post-Chandler noir. The narrator is Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heel private eye – the ‘I’ in this case standing not for ‘investigator’ but ‘inquisitor’ – with low karma, less cash and an ...”

“... matter. ‘We cannot afford to have our attention deflected by any other issue, important as it may be,’ Jeff Halper, of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, wrote in a recent manifesto. ‘It is either a just and viable solution now or apartheid now . . . the next three to six months will tell.’ But Halper’s warning is odd in two ...”

“... be negotiated in the act of reading.’ The gap between the speech of Jesus and Thomas’s reply may look like a pretty good instance of a gap that needs filling; and of course practically everybody, including the painters and their patrons, the priests and their flocks, has been filling it for centuries. But now it seems they were wrong. Applying himself to ...”

“... nothing about them, because we learn almost nothing about Richards either. This glazed reticence may, however, tell us something in itself, especially if it is viewed as part and parcel of the public persona of the man in the middle of the Modern Movement. At this point, let me lay my own credentials on the table, since what follows stems in part from my own ...”

“... even the most reflective Americans to think in anything but liberal terms (however ingenious they may be, as Louis Hartz once so cleverly showed, in deploying those terms), it is a view which continues to haunt them. Perhaps Tocqueville was right? Perhaps it really is the case that the most nearly liberal society is one in which the promise of such a society ...”

“... there for 21 years. Thornton asks us to regard him simply as a morphine addict. Freud and Cocaine may be inspired by concern for drug-damage, for the failures of ‘permissiveness’. It certainly has it in for Charcot, Freud, Marcuse, Timothy Leary. At times, it can look like medical history as penned by Kingsley Amis, and I suspect it of a harmless, if ...”