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“... Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s ...”

“... in the race for Labour’s deputy leadership against the candidate supported by the Tribune Group, John Prescott? Right again. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by ...”

“... of their civil rights in order to spare the family from ruin or infamy. One noted alienist, John Haslam, hinted at an affinity between respect for property and sanity, insinuating that a disregard for or neglect of property was evidence of a delusional state. Asked whether miserly habits indicated unsoundness of mind, Haslam replied: ‘If those miserly ...”

“... he ran away three times in one week from the school to which an Essex County boarding scholarship took him. He managed to do well enough in his A-levels to get into Leeds University to read law, where he got a predictably disappointing degree. Both his parents were, in different ways, politically committed and Straw as boy and student had intense political ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”

“... already ireful coloured persons gets to hear the ITV soundtrack on which the following exchange took place. Commentator: ‘The Cameroon goalkeeper learned his trade from the great German, Sepp Meier, and that is why he wears those black track-suit trousers. Meier gave them to him.’ Expert (chuckling): ‘I didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit ...”

“... any other audience’. Thus it defied Reith’s doctrine of a BBC-unified culture, and Sir John was heard to protest. For less exalted reasons, it also irritated most of the press. But for a time it survived the traumas of its birth, and under George Barnes and Harman Grisewood there was a reasonably permissive, though it would now also be called an ...”

“... also phoning it in. Witness the completely pointless recent remake with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot. John Malkovich is about to impersonate the great detective in a Christmas adaptation of The ABC Murders – now that one I’m looking forward to.) A novel in which the detective did it. A novel in which the entire structure of the story was suggested by a title ...”

“... a quivering graduate student at Oxford in 1973, fresh from the Northern provinces, I sat for the John Locke Prize, a voluntary two-day examination for Oxford postgraduates in philosophy. As I had hitherto been a psychology student at Manchester, I thought this would be good practice for my upcoming B.Phil. philosophy exams. It was quite an ordeal (I nearly ...”

“... about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel ...”

“... Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At my suggestion, John Tagg the critic and historian of photography joined our meetings. The three of us agreed – a pretty cynical move – to ask Cork, the new editor of Studio International whom Peter knew as a Cambridge connection, to make up this Gang of Four. The idea was ...”

“... hurried back for the bride. We got to Lewes about 7. 15 and breakfasted at The White Horse and took out a licence, I being a bondsman for the poor creature. We came back just by 11 o’clock when we immediately repaired to church and Mr Porter married them in Mr French’s, the clerk’s, and my presence, I being what is commonly called ‘father’. The ...”

“... with them of fifteen billion dollars because of the distorted price structure.’ Gaidar’s line took two years to work its way through the system and remains an area of contention even now. For the moment Gaidar himself has retired, leaving the field to men who do not wish to treat the other Republics as sovereign states, and who are actively attempting to ...”

“... for Point Counter Point. He lacked Waugh’s genuine passion for snobbery and religion, and took time to develop his own disagreeable substitute for humour, exemplified by the moment in Brighton Rock when the nice girl Ida, foolish enough to enjoy the simple sentimentalities of life, weeps in the crematorium as ‘Fred became part of the smoke nuisance ...”

“... de Musset was so brief, or the nasty circumstances in which she eventually broke with Chopin (who took her problem daughter’s side against her mother): in retrospect, she’s prepared to be harsh towards herself alone. The outrageous Baudelaire laid the blame for her doveishness on the Devil, ‘who has persuaded her to trust herself to her kind heart and ...”