“... for Apartheid), or of a Voltairean Erasmus, a mere dilettante in theological matters, or of a Henry VIII hungry for more and more sex, or of a merely temporising Cranmer or a proto-Machiavellian Thomas Cromwell. How many English men and women in the pew have ever been told from the pulpit or from episcopal or archiepiscopal thrones what the Church of ...”

“... with the question ‘what effect did the Second World War have on the life of this country,’ Henry Pelling insisted on writing a very straightforward (and very useful) textbook which made only the faintest show of engaging with the interrelationship between war and society. In 1973 (its third year in business) the Open University offered ‘War and ...”

“... end.’ For pity’s sake, are we talking about the university as conceived in the head of John Henry Newman, or about the sorry actualities in which Frank Kermode and I and until lately Helen Gardner have severally earned our keep? We may believe indeed that the Oxford English Faculty maintained, while Dame Helen was a member of it, a standard of ...”

“... Scott, Carlyle, Dickens, Trollope, Clough, Hawthorne, Browning, George Eliot, Hardy, Arnold and Henry James. In many cases, the editors have singled out Hutton in their introductions as outstandingly shrewd and appreciative among contemporary critics. We clearly need to have a new selection of his best essays. Hutton’s concern was always to see how ...”

“... desert, with figures trudging towards a horizon of seemingly limitless waste. Here the language of Henry Moore’s truncated nudes reverberates with visions of ruined, pharaonic colossi. ‘The Beloved of the Sayyidah’ by Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (c.1950) Henein and his fellow rebels were utopian dreamers, and sexual freedom too was part of their ...”

“... whose commitment to this and other left-wing causes, including the Presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, had led to their ostracism by Montgomery society. The Durrs arranged for her to attend a training session at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a meeting ground for labour and civil rights radicals, where activists were trained and ...”

“... remarkably similar to something she had seen in The Exorcist. However, her claim to possess evil power was not entirely false: her fellow creatures were not real to her. If there is evil in the world, this may be where it starts from. At the same time she wrote poetry which is freshly expressed, and may have been the antidote to the ‘bad movie’ of her ...”

“... out again, he could have stayed with me. The perils of believing in ‘the message’, or in the power of a single substance, occupy E.M. Thornton and Andrea Dworkin. Thornton’s bizarre, monomaniacal thesis is straightforward enough. Sigmund Freud was a dope-fiend, wired, for longer than he ever admitted, on cocaine, and all his theories display this ...”

“... in the two volumes, and yet they could have been written in this way by nobody else. As Henry James noted, Kipling ‘made straight for the common and the characteristic’, the two in this context being the same, and one of the remarkable features of the record, not found in the war memoirs of actual participants like Sassoon and Blunden, is the ...”

“... a commonplace: the ‘socialism’ of the government which Tawney’s writings helped to bring to power in 1945 was utterly remote from the single-party stale, collectivised economy and revolutionary proletarianism of socialism in its authentic sense. A modest extension of nationalisation, the provision of universal welfare services financed by progressive ...”

“... what was most sublime and ridiculous in Pugin’s later career had its origins in the theatre. The power of his best church architecture is based on his understanding of sight lines, on the manipulation of light, the formation of processions, the effect of figures moving in three-dimensional space – which informed his designs for vestments ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... and youthful, after all.’ But the motif survives that irony. Raine finds it most seriously in Henry James and Matthew Arnold; in James in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Private Life’, Washington Square and other fictions of the unlived life; in Arnold in his poem ‘The Buried Life’: And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have ...”

“... square miles of South Kensington. He is in no doubt that London’s agglomeration of wealth, power and status is damaging to the rest of the country, but makes clear that this is just as damaging to Londoners. The ‘concentration of all English politics in London has meant the disappearance of London politics’, he writes, eclipsed by Westminster’s ...”

“... Amanda Bailey’s Shakespeare on Consent argues that sexual choice is problematic because of the power imbalances not just between genders but between racial groups, inequalities that have led down the years to a disproportionate number of accusations of sexual assault being made against black men in America (she teaches at the University of Maryland). Any ...”