“... which faces Europe in the closing years of this century is certainly as great ... as any which one may read about in history.’ The final volumes of Settecento Riformatore deal with this crisis. Enlightened ministers in Spain and Portugal were driven from power by a revival of traditional values. The Netherlands, which had always been an important centre of ...”

“... the new Minister for Sport, appointed in the wake of the Socialist victories of last May and June, let it be known that she disapproved of the investments which were being made in this national venture. This is one of the incursions of politics into French sport: the Left disapprove of those who are in sport for the money, and just as the ...”

“... than a hundred parishes to give a base for the period before the accession of Elizabeth I. It may also have been a mistake to have selected parishes by size, for the pattern of child and infant deaths seems to have differed according to the size of the parish. But the Cambridge Group were working with over three million figures, and it would be ...”

“... heart. To Diana Trilling she exhibited the belle indifférence of the morbid hysteric, but it may be that during the trial Mrs Harris simply had no appropriate emotions available to her. She had left them all behind, and without regret, for they had all been ugly. Most important of all, she was no longer frightened – frightened by her envy of the girls ...”

“... of the struggle that the novel is fitted to describe. In writing of English fiction Trilling may sometimes screw up the moral tension rather high: but he is very far from finicking or high-faluting views of these matters. He sees the novel as the vehicle of freedom and insight: but he sees it too as inextricably involved with the shifts and compromises ...”

“... thought. But what did this come to mean in practice? Rigorous pursuit of an economic calling may be seen as an automatic route to capital accumulation, but this need not mean capitalist success. On the face of things, the government of Scotland was keen to promote economic development. Dr Marshall examines the economic legislation of the Scottish ...”

“... found it oppressive; but the majority lived in cheerful disobedience.’ Well, that is what it may have looked like from the perspective of Combe Florey House and Downside, but not, I can assure Mr Waugh, from the point of view of the Catholic ‘majority’ in ordinary parishes up and down this country. When my wife and I married in 1959, the Catholic ...”

“... about them and a mysterious past.’ This is a tackily put insight, but a ‘mysterious past’ may have its value for our imagination in not being imagined by us. To imagine much beyond the scope of the film is a form of projection that may tell us about the projector but can only negatively – by exceeding it – tell ...”

“... strong positive feelings, even a kind of glory, to Crusoe’s island activities. I think it may be wisest, for the moment anyway, to give up ‘capitalism’ as a key to Robinson Crusoe, and this indeed is what more recent critics have been tending to do. Of the books under review, both Laura Curtis’s and Geoffrey Sill’s offer an ethical rather than ...”

“... is a ‘bad thing’, a characteristic of law-breakers and terrorists: policemen and soldiers who may appear to be acting in much the same way are seldom described as violent. But at other times in our history and in other countries at the present day violent action has been differently assessed. Montaigne in his celebrated essay on cannibalism noted that the ...”

“... the men from direct control over the work process. The institution of conciliation procedures may have been welcome to union officials, but it shifted the union towards a position of neutrality. In collective bargaining the unions were implicated in the decisions they helped arrange and enforce – indeed the author goes so far as to call them ...”

“... by jazz musicians, as he had done in his Chicago youth more than fifty years before. Rexroth may have been anti-metropolitan, but there was nothing narrowly provincial about him, even though I can never think of him as having originated anywhere but in the American Midwest at the one creative time in its history. He developed an enthusiasm for the poetry ...”

“... it unbearable that he should be playing a character who doesn’t care that his mother-in-law may be dying, Kenny had inserted his own line: ‘I’ll go and see her doctor tomorrow.’ I wrote in my diary at the time: ‘It’s as if after Tuzenbach’s death in Three Sisters Irena were to come on and say: “I have three tickets for the 11.30 train to ...”

“... You may not like the book, but you will be impressed by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore ...”

“... none of you ever seen a Darwin who wasn’t mostly Wedgwood.’ Josiah Wedgwood’s chin may have gone underground, as it were, in the 19th century – hidden beneath those ubiquitous Victorian beards – but it has survived, as unmistakable as the Hapsburg jaw, to surface on many a 20th-century Wedgwood face. Unfortunately, parents usually expect ...”