“... careless (‘Lawrence has caricatured a characteristic group of cronies...’) The fictions may not go very deep, but memory inscribes its potency on every ...”

“... explosive blacked goods. Consider – and I fear that this is precisely what the House of Commons may have to do for many hours in the coming months, and, heaven help us, years – the hazards and logistics of supplying the Falklands from Britain. It would not be a question of the occasional supply ship. There would have to be convoys. Why should we suppose ...”

“... is insufficient to sustain a conclusion the author feels no obligation to concoct one, though he may suggest possibilities. Every assertion is anchored to references of full length and perfect clarity. Professor Woolrych undertakes the investigation of four major problems. Why did Cromwell dissolve the Rump? Were the aims of the army officers the same in ...”

“... singular mourners of Jude’s creator. The funeral was in January 1928. It now occurs to me that I may be the last survivor of those who attended it. At any rate I am the only one who has set down his impressions of this macabre occasion. Hitler became German Chancellor just over fifty years ago, on 30 January 1930. Nearly every historian-journalist has had a ...”

“... wrote a ponderous book on the workings of the capitalist system. But how many people read it? Some may struggle through the first volume, which Marx more or less completed. It contains some lively passages on the horrors of capitalism, but the demonstration of how the worker is robbed at the point of production no longer carries conviction. Volumes Two and ...”

“... something remarkably familiar about the tone of the book. The voice that speaks from these pages may seem to echo the voices of Western feminists and socialists of the last century, the Pankhursts and the Webbs: it is a voice which seems old-fashioned now in England but which, encountered in this book, commands respect. The feminism of Senegal – a society ...”

“... starts in September 1939 and runs until December 1941. There is also another starting date: 10 May 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister and virtually the dictator of the country. This became clearer to me the more I read. There have been strong prime ministers before and maybe since. But there has been none who actually ran the whole show. Churchill ...”

“... is here that the problems begin. The theoretical issues can’t be left in suspense, but something may be said, first, about the relevant historical context. It seems there has been a major shift of interest, in the last twenty years, from literary criticism to biography, just as, forty years earlier, there was a major shift from literary history and history ...”

“... a hundred years, or what particular reversals or compoundings of ancient errors and inhumanities may by then be ...”

“... treats, in less detail, some ‘problematical cases’ of sketchbooks that are bound today but may not have been when they were used. The authors, it should be pointed out, do not undertake the impossible task of cataloguing all Beethoven’s sketches – just all his sketchbooks: but this part does consider the two hundred-odd surviving loose ...”

“... this point, however: he knows that ‘reform eugenics’ contained class-dependent bias, that it may even have been self-deluding. Yet his account of post-Penrosian genetics, as in the work of R. A. Fisher, errs on the side of naivety; and not everyone will agree with him about the amount of degenerationist thinking that lingered in the scientific work of ...”

“... adapted to circumstance that the fouling of the mother’s breast by the faeces of her own baby may actually be advantageous to survival. Some mothers in the past, especially those in the upper classes, were so constricted by tight-lacing that their nipples were driven inwards and became useless for suckling. Others gave their milk for so long that their ...”

“... creation of the hospital state’ à la Foucault – before gradually accepting that it may in fact be a creation of nature and ‘random bad luck’. As Dominique moves towards integration and prevention, William heads for the wilder shores of identity politics, denouncing his former lover as a collaborator for going ‘whining’ to the state for ...”

“... taken as far as it has ever been taken by the Moon landings that Kennedy announced as a goal on 25 May 1961. Why? Because we can – maybe. That ‘maybe’ is another part of the reason these feats haven’t been repeated. They were seriously risky. Kittinger’s record-breaking jump was the third in a sequence of three. On the first, he was spun around at ...”

“... kind of nationalist academic apartheid is being constructed. In the future, students from England may well be less inclined to enter Scottish universities out of exasperation at having to pay fees from which Scots are exempt. Conversely, many Scots are likely to be put off from studying south of the border by the prospect of heavy fees there. Yet it would ...”