“... they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide elections held on 6 May, during which results continued to trickle in. Labour was expected to lose the Hartlepool by-election, but the margin of its defeat, announced in the early hours, set the story of a ‘heartlands catastrophe’ rolling. Ben Houchen’s crushing Conservative ...”

“... a work of critical commentary, as mind-expanding as a perfect peach (eat it now – by tomorrow it may be going off). But it is also a novel posing as a memoir, with scenes so gentle that the foreboding takes a second or so to creep in: ‘Autumn in Los Angeles is a kind of shrivelling, a contraction not just of time, the daylight hours, but of ...”

“... a zoophile on every committee won’t bring the New Jerusalem any closer. Assimilating more people may be a way of extending the sway of the system, not of transforming it. Anyway, when it comes to allowing serial child abusers to become schoolteachers, Sam Goldwyn’s legendary cry of ‘Include me out!’ has a point. Who decides who is to be included? And ...”

“... Emancipation involves escape, but having got out of the Victorian prison, what then? The new world may seem wholly delightful, like Blake’s Beulah or Keats’s Chamber of Maiden Thought, or the land of sexual intercourse we entered in 1963, so why not stay in it for ever? Somewhere at the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing ...”

“... good ones; the hacks sometimes making a better job of it.’ It’s a valuable point. But a reader may find it difficult not to stop and wonder whether this distinguished novelist ranks himself with the gifted who can’t or with the hacks who can. A commonsensical distinction doesn’t seem to work from the inside. There is something in common between ...”

“... to them. This tells us a lot about the religious balance of Henrician England. One example may show the knife-edge on which the Henricians were trying to walk. They allowed images, but not the worshipping of images, and decided it was wrong to put candles before the image of saints, but right to put them before the crucifix. This middle section of the ...”

“... all aspire to look as much like each other as possible. To foxhunters, each set of half a dozen may elaborate an excitingly different narrative of the multiple events that intervene between a view and a kill, but to the uninitiated, one print of hunting or shooting is barely distinguishable from another, and all seem to mean exactly the same ...”

“... Shirer, whose vast chronicle of the Third Reich sat on all our bookshelves thirty years ago. Kyle may have done enough research to take on the academics at their own game, but he shows that the hard-earned skills of his old trade have not deserted him in his zest for getting the story out to the public. And quite a story it is. For an intertwined ...”

“... labour on De Quincey has anything much to do with taking him to be an important writer. Barrell may well think him that, but is almost entirely preoccupied with establishing that even though De Quincey was quite good at doing so, he understands rather better the way one thing bears on another. De Quincey used the noun ‘involute’, borrowed from ...”

“... other crimes, including doing barely credible damage to the Duke of Norfolk’s deer-park – he may have thought it was Buckingham’s – twice breaking into Combe Abbey to steal its goods and insult the abbot, and repeatedly mustering large numbers of armed men to lead in theft, raid, or riot. High points of his career include breaking out of prison at ...”

“... sobriety, unfailing contentment … Gargantua, Prologue, translated by J.R. Cohen Rabelais, too, may be compared to a Silenus. His big book is not unlike that little box painted with grotesques. Whether the comic exterior conceals a serious message – the marrow of the bone – has been a matter of controversy from his day to ours. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... Khazanov’s global comparative study of pastoral nomadism is unique. The level of erudition may be indicated by the bare statistic that the bibliography runs to 48 closely printed pages of which 23 refer exclusively to works in Russian. For those who are not specialists in the field at this level of intensity, and perhaps even for those who are, the 16 pages of Ernest Gellner’s ‘Foreword’ provide essential reading ...”

“... with the tedious but mildly pressing problems of the Irish electorate’. Douglas Hurd may not yet be bored, but he would have difficulty in bettering the description of the problems he is facing. So few of them have changed, or have been solved. Part of the difficulty, indeed, is that the nature of the original solution was that it could be ...”

“... Hoy indeed goes further than this, and suggests that Derrida’s obstinate dedication to ambiguity may cause him to fall, irretrievably, between two stools. ‘We could decide his texts were neither literature nor philosophy, nor anything else.’ For someone who is more keenly aware of being adrift in the ‘sea of texts’, this categorical judgment is hard ...”

“... reveal that he has used English, French, Polish, Latin, German, Russian and Ukrainian sources. He may rightly say that his work is more up-to-date than The Cambridge History of Poland, edited by W. J. Reddaway and produced in 1941-50. The title of his work, God’s Playground, is perhaps not a very happy translation of the Polish expression Boze Igrzysko, but ...”