“... These are the ashes of old controversy, and my excuse for raking them over is that doing so may throw light on a tiny fragment of the past which seems to grow in interest even as it begins to slip out of historical focus: that is, what it was like to grow up in the Thirties – in my case, in the late Thirties. I arrived at Westminster School, as a ...”

“... the news failed, for essentially bureaucratic reasons, to reach the New Zealand Police. This may or may not be true. Either way, no doubt MI6 enjoyed the discomfiture of the French and the French, knowing they were being laughed at, hated it. As a consequence of the Greenpeace affair, the DGSE now has its fourth ...”

“... of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values which he blamed for an agonising war. In all this, the Liberals were avenging themselves on the Right, and Strachey’s assaults probably helped to mould, and were certainly ...”

“... genuine ingredients from Dark Age epic and romance. Nor does it seem improbable that its success may have had some underground influence on other British fiction of the time, however seemingly different. Narrative can make fantasy out of stirring past events, or it can make pseudo-epic. Does J.G. Farrell take the Celtic line in The Siege of Krishnapur, and ...”

“... be required to respect hen roosts when he is hungry. The bombardment of a town is deplorable but may be necessary in order to enforce its surrender, though only the necessary minimum should be used. Despite these exceptions, the Enlightened 18th century did pretty well with the laws of war. Armies carried their commissariat train with them instead of living ...”

“... the Drugs Division of the Home Office by whom the idea of using cannabis as a subject for research may have been thought a tall story. Todd was now so obviously a coming man that jobs were offered almost as a matter of course, and at the age of 30 he was made Professor of Chemistry and head of the chemical laboratories of the University of Manchester. Here he ...”

“... are some people whom we envy not because they are rich or handsome or successful, although they may be any or all of these, but because everything they are and do seems to be all of a piece, so that even if they wanted to they could not be or do otherwise.’ Marianne Moore is a case in point: her poetry is packed with moral nostrums and eccentric ...”

“... of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of examples. What may be more significant, Peter Widdowson has for some years edited a journal called Literature and History, which publishes scholarly articles, more dispassionately written and usually more fully documented, on specialist topics such as the historical references ...”

“... that might not have happened to a thousand Shaws, and a million Smiths. Perhaps our psychoanalysts may find in such dull stuff clues that have escaped me.’ Although he makes no mention of it, this is the fair but discouraging challenge that Arnold Silver has taken up. The ‘darker side’ alluded to by his title consists not, as Shaw himself might have ...”

“... from whose influence the composition of the Arcadia marks a break. But while Sidney may indeed have wearied of Languet’s tutelage, a suggestion tellingly made, the debt to his ideas persisted. What interests Duncan-Jones about ‘Ister Bank’ is not its politics but a more straightforward feature which other critics have, it is ...”

“... he projects his own unresolved conflicts about sex and the psyche. Thus we learn that Flournoy may have ‘failed to comprehend’ his own emotional transference onto Smith, or the manifold ways that he perhaps exploited her in his ambitious quest for knowledge. He sought to ‘taxonomise’ the ‘museum of all possible phenomena’ he found in ...”

“... There may be only two writers, currently at work in America, who can bring themselves, unblushing, to use the phrase ‘drinky poo’. Two Wodehousian renegades. One drops the words, like a pair of maraschino cherries, into his sunburst fiction. The other, a poet, whose work is his life, is happy to go either way: rhyme them or float them, with a winning question mark, at the conclusion of an in-your-face Greenwich Village monologue ...”

“... that is very well and so far there is nothing new: all the world has heard as much and people may believe or not as they think good.’ Is this casualness based on confidence that Mary knows the rumour to be false, or knows it to be true? Either seems possible. Physical lovers or not, what becomes clear, I think, is a sort of submarine constancy in ...”

“... She had believed that university would be an escape from provincial life. ‘Oxford I trust may lead to something,’ she had written in her diary, ‘but Buxton never will.’ It was a place where she hoped to do as men did, ‘no longer the angel set up on a pedestal, and shut out of everything, and no longer the toy, the sort of soft cushion or ...”

“... fighting about the nature of MPD has become a new way of fighting about psychoanalysis. We may be at the end of the Freudian century, but psychoanalytic concepts such as the dynamic unconscious have a powerful cultural presence. Is fighting over the nature of MPD – whether it is real or ‘constructed’ – one of the ways we are sorting out our ...”