“... in their efforts to be liked. He compares them to schoolchildren wheedling: ‘Sir! Oh sir! May I walk with you, Sir?’ There’s too much sucking up and trying to be clever. They must all learn they’ll never get round me. Other poets are there to be made use of, especially their metres. Kipling is handy – The Gods of the Copybook Headings treat ...”

“... to change and the constitution was more flexible than the myth of Venice suggests. Finlay’s book may be criticised on a number of counts. It slides rather too easily from the narrow period, 1490-1530, which, thanks to Sanudo, he knows best, to the wider period, 1450-1630, which he knows rather less well. The organisation of the book is somewhat confusing. A ...”

“... view that ‘the novelist’s task is “to reproduce” ’ she tells us: ‘Nature or Life may serve as an arbitrary starting-point, yet there is no doubt that all its plants and flowers are already producing patterns and embroideries that cry out for interpretation, for the retracing of their history of perception and reproduction’ (my italics). It ...”

“... something you can make into something. I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing.’ That may have been true in 1964, but by 1979 she was singing and writing to such powerful effect that she produced this album: indefinable, compelling, elusive and immediate, contradictory and straightforward, moving and puzzling, a vulnerable ...”

“... Both Lord Home and Matthew are posed uneasily in front of iron railings guarding a statue of what may conceivably be the founder of the college: on the sleeve of Roy Hattersley’s book is a photograph of his proud parents swinging their offspring, in a solar topee, across the sands at Bridlington. There is no doubt in my mind which of the two authors was ...”

“... allowed to persist beyond a moment or two of genial acknowledgment. To fall in love with oneself may, as Oscar Wilde observed, be the beginning of a lifelong romance, but to fall in love with the lengthened shadow of one’s writerly possibilities as projected by the mellow light of kindly critical attention – that is the beginning of folly. The act of ...”

“... who know nothing of swords, ploughs or books. But the process of change, however improbable it may have been, cannot be put into reverse. So what will happen next? To what uses will the enormous productive capacity of industrial societies be put? What novel modes of thought and behaviour will the next advances in knowledge and technique bring in their ...”

“... pietà. Einstein is watching. He is not impressed’) and by even crankier footnotes. Her message may be cuddly, but the reader gets pushed around. She is always jumping out at him from the thickets of her strange imagination and eccentric prose and giving him frights – or else lectures. The lectures are annoying, but Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz is still an ...”

“... made a film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs in a revamped Tyneham), Mike Leigh (via Nuts in May), Nigel Coates, even David Mellor. The piquant list of names should convey something of the flavour of Wright’s book, and also the flavour of Purbeck as he understands its role in 20th-century English culture. Wright’s reminder of how muddled is the ...”

“... Sometimes he saw himself less as a spy than as a very high-class gossip writer. He may have allowed men to go to their deaths, and even taken some risks himself, but he has trouble believing that the information he conveys is of any importance. Anyway, as he tells his interviewer, ‘I did not spy for the Russians. I spied for Europe.’ And ...”

“... voice, show that she is willing to carry the fashion war into the enemy camp. Women’s clothes may be criticised as irrational and unhealthy, she seems to be saying, but male dress, too, can be seen in terms of the tormenting experience of a naive boy who is forced into it. Barber knows as well as Kuchta that masculine dress is a construction of power, and ...”

“... so that the imprints of their soles can be compared with those of the 15-year-old unknown who may be the narrator’s brother. The macabre element is reinforced by a chance encounter with a hearse-driver in the carpark outside the university canteen, which, the driver tells them, is famous for its ‘cordon bleu’ cooking. This loquacious character is ...”

“... essay on Englishness, gives no idea of the journal’s cumulative brilliance. Single pictures may undermine each other. Chris Steele-Perkins’s slice-of-life reportage, showing girls fighting on the ground beside a parked car with men looking on, is printed opposite a photograph by Chris Killip of two young men and two cars by the sea – an image as ...”

“... aspirations and said to himself: ‘Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ The point is rather different, an amplification of the dilemma. We manage to understand each other pretty well, in spite of our differences of idiom and culture – even if most of the authorities in the movie refuse ...”

“... tolerance, real democracy, liberal Hollywood, whatever a tyrannical, monolithic establishment may be supposed to be against: this is what died symbolically at Nicaea, and this is the movie’s grail, whatever the storyline says. For Constantine, in the movie, read neo-con. Although as the movie shows us when McKellen, as Teabing, goes barking mad, we ...”