“... conditions of blacks, Hispanics and the homeless end up mattering very much. Aids propaganda may have contributed something to allowing George Bush to punctuate his paeans to Reagan-era prosperity with the sickening refrain: ‘And we’re not going to let them take it away from you.’ ‘Them’ didn’t only refer to the Democrats: it also signified ...”

“... they could not survive in accommodation with other traditions. They must live apart. Living apart may have been acceptable as long as their hold on power was underpinned by successive British goverments: but that is no longer the case. The fundamental change that has taken place as a result of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is a change that is deeply and fully ...”

“... for the narrator’s habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ...”

“... to describe how institutions work, he can expose the limitations of the revealing anecdote. On 25 May 1811, while Catholic Relief was debated in the House of Commons, every Irish member present was (it seems) intoxicated. It’s not clear why we learn this, rather than anything of the debate, or of what led up to it, or of the franchise more generally. Even ...”

“... was that Egypt would not be ready for war at least until the end of 1970. During the crisis of May 1967, the intelligence chiefs completely misread the meaning of the Egyptian and Jordanian moves. The draft of the 1967 annual intelligence evaluation, prepared in May, explicitly stated that there was no chance that war ...”

“... peace initiative was launched by the Israeli Government prior to Shamir’s visit to Washington in May 1989. The Government offered to hold free municipal elections on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and to allow the inhabitants a greater measure of autonomy in the running of their daily affairs. The offer was hedged around by restrictions. It did not extend ...”

“... photographers at her showings on purpose to promote copying and permit ‘stealing’. Chanel may have been an insecure person, with her steady need to boast about her professional importance and her personal superiority, and her automatic habit of disparaging the achievements of others and the taste of their clients: and yet it worked. Some of it was a ...”

“... human situations, for they only permit us to discover what we already know, Here Bakhtin may seem to be making a point very similar to a common recent criticism of much Marxist or feminist criticism: that it is repetitious and sees the same thing in very different works. If we look more closely, however, we see that Bakhtin does more than this: by ...”

“... Ideas’, but there is one inheritance which they especially enjoyed, and which we may be especially glad of: a ferocious eloquence, a virtuoso capacity for charged denunciation and for the vivid expression of a taste for life. Henry Junior, perhaps because he was the placid mother’s favourite, seems to me to have most successfully worked to ...”

“... Nashe. In 1599 the bishops had ordered ‘that all Nashe’s books ... be taken wheresoever they may be found and that none of [his] books be ever printed hereafter.’ Within two years, having been prohibited from earning his living as a writer, Nashe had died, in extreme poverty. In Middleton’s fable, the Nightingale, who is herself a poet, laments to ...”

“... humiliation (‘but actually I don’t really care because it is only the beginning and it may be necessary to fight this battle year after year’). As it turned out, it verged on a triumph for Benn, since Healey’s margin over him in the electoral college was, as he justifiably put it, ‘an absolute whisker’s difference’. But this, as it turned ...”

“... set adrift from the respectability of marriage and driven to fight her battles in public. Besant may well have felt attracted to Bradlaugh and Stead, but what she most needed from men was companionship in the pursuit of moral ideals. Certainly, her life had a richly quirky and wilful side. But was it any more quirky than those of her male contemporaries ...”

“... with the tyrant’s musical performances on top of everything else was the last straw. ‘Orestes may have murdered his mother,’ wrote the satirist Juvenal, ‘but at least he never sang on stage.’ One of the most striking passages in Suetonius’ Life is where he describes the Emperor’s nervousness before competition. He suffered terribly from ...”

“... increasing at a fast pace, allowing employers to rid themselves of employees just as fast. There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ – the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by ...”

“... of George Eliot. That Isabel Archer’s idealism is Emersonian is indisputable, even if a reader may wonder why Henry James was so ungenerous when he wrote about Middlemarch. In retrospect, Poirier’s book on James seems largely a prelude to the much more powerful A World Elsewhere, which established its author’s critical importance. Subtitled ‘The ...”