“... bores prepared to bang on interminably provided they get in on the act, whatever the act may be? ‘A son killing his mother,’ one of them says, ‘is Greek Tragedy, but this is worse – much much worse.’ Yes much much worse. As literature, that is – or perhaps one should say as reading matter. Reviewing Peter Manso’s Mailer, Elizabeth ...”

“... is the rule – what Ms Ang describes as ‘the position of permanent expectation’. This may turn the characters, and the audiences, into nervous wrecks (‘After a tenth of that stress I would be lying in a psychiatric hospital,’ said a ‘well-known Dutch doctor’): very rarely does it make them corpses. Here the heroes are only removed when ...”

“... it only remains for a superlatively youthful Minister for the Draft to be appointed, although it may be objected that after Lord Young has completed his overhaul of the YTS, such an appointment will be unnecessary. Another irony concerns the improved standing of Burchill herself, and her unmistakable debt to Mrs Thatcher. Indeed the punk whose existence once ...”

“... chest – and then three days later returned and put his own heart in its place. On 20 May 1619, the stakes, already high, suddenly became much higher. Jesus appeared to Benedetta and told her that he wished to marry her. Moreover, he had precise and rather elaborate ideas for the procession, the decorations in the chapel, the ceremony itself, even ...”

“... ever. In the event of a hat-trick for the Conservatives, the Nuffield study of the next election may well conclude that Simon Hughes’s Conference intervention was the first decisive move towards the result. This prognosis could be a reason for opting out, but it isn’t one that Kilroy gives. If you think you have won – and Kilroy, after all, claims a ...”

“... Jean Shrimpton, and lived with her for several years. I assume that this item of personal history may be mentioned without impertinence, because Heathcote has published, next to a mutilated photograph of Jean, a virulent exercise in loathing called Polythene Pam which rivals Céline’s lunatic ravings against the Jews in its intemperate nastiness. It is ...”

“... adjures them to flee the contamination of the undecided as well as the sceptical. It may have been too easy to applaud as an attack on America Miss Stead’s insight into the tradition of individualism, which in Sam tips so effortlessly into fascism, and which, as Rosalind Mitchison once put it, could mean permissiveness, but ‘could also mean ...”

“... again, is modish cultural despair, delightfully alleviated by wit. By the end of the Seventies it may appear a shade less brilliant than it did forty years ago because its large generalisations are now so ...”

“... Cabinet reaches decisions only by voting – Rabin describes a vote of nine votes to nine on 28 May 1967 on whether Israel should go to war. In April 1971, when before the Yom Kippur War the Egyptians formulated proposals for the opening of the Suez Canal and partial settlement in Sinai, Rabin was so exasperated, he says, that it was ‘one of the rare ...”

“... very clever indeed: the conception itself is ingenious, the pastiche little short of brilliant. I may be underestimating ‘Immram’ by praising it in these terms; and if that is so, let me hasten to say that brilliance, a surface attribute, is not the most remarkable feature of this poet’s work. In its generally elusive, yet sometimes fearsomely direct ...”

“... tradition of Anglicanism’ is, and the phrase seems less ringingly positive than Dame Helen may have intended. Donne’s traditionalism does not fit into a pattern as easily as Hooker’s. Hooker’s major work was written in his role as servant and defender of the Establishment, while Donne’s role was always rather more obviously uncertain. Born a ...”

“... about here is the tactics of self-preservation in an obstinately unregenerated society ... It may be objected that Prometheus plans to retire from a regenerated world, but the point there is that Prometheus and Asia have no business in such a world, for they are immortals. Prometheus’ job is done ...’ Shelley’s remark is thus immediately located in ...”

“... and trusting more than is academically prudent in the veracity of memory. Mass Observation reports may not be strictly representative, but each one is the direct testimony of an individual set down unvarnished while the experience was still warm and the outcome unknown.Angus Calder was among the first historians to make extensive use of the Mass Observation ...”

“... the creator saw further than the follower of Chatterton. However quaint the ‘slug-horn’ may seem in Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its ...”

“... an ability to suggest situation, in the music of Monteverdi and Cavalli. Such things may have engaged the attentions of librettist and composer: the audiences no doubt were more concerned with the scenic marvels. Such expenses were the cause of theatres going in and out of commission in Venice, but the various syndicates were surely not ...”