“... 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 ...”

“... This leads to such extraordinary statements as: ‘The bomb which disintegrated Stevie may have been a wish-fulfilment for the entire clan.’ Professor Karl’s reading of the novel strikes me as almost grotesque. In the Foreword, Karl depicts Conrad as someone who ‘found in marginality itself a way of life’, and having lighted on that word ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1967 partly to the tobacco issue, which is nonsense. I suspect, from these errors, that he may overstate his case on the political impact of tobacco, and some of the chapter on Ronald Reagan is clearly guilty of that. But this is a very good book indeed, and everyone interested in the way power works in capitalist (not pluralist) society should read ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I would say it is inevitable that something is going to snap. Quite what it will be – and it may not have escaped notice that the two scenarios I have not dismissed are two and five – I cannot judge. And it is perhaps unfair to look to Messrs Butler and Kavanagh for clairvoyance. Their book claims to be nothing other than the picture of a political ...”

“... It wasn’t new. There was not even a kindly schoolmaster who put books into my hands. I think one may have tried to, but it was not until I was 16 and a bit late in the day. Another boy had shown me Stephen Spender’s World Within World, or at any rate the bits dealing with homosexuality, the references to which (while pretty opaque by today’s ...”

“... stance which was precious to her. Through the laburnums and the net curtains, she said, ‘you may snuff the quick-witted high-lying life of a suburban community.’ Her heart went out to all she saw and overheard of the lonely, the peculiar, the poisonously nice, the fatally well-intentioned, and to those misplaced in life who, respectable to all ...”

“... on the other, as probably it is. This is not the first instance we have seen in modern history. It may be that the political options are so inexorably black and white that the right public choice seems to subsume all the private virtues. But such a vision excludes the accidents, the mixture of motives, the inherited irrationalities that are the normal ...”

“... democratisation of intellectual culture because many of the non-intellectuals was none of it. We may still be living through the reaction to the 19th-century pattern of middle-class attempts to impose on those below patterns of recreation which were docile, rational and not self-destructive, to wean them from drink and badger-baiting to ...”

“... these literary aspects. You must be awfully good in your field.’ The literary aspects of Pinball may be illustrated thus... Style: ‘ “What’s more, I’m an insomniac!” ‘Macbeth has murdered sleep,” ’ she quoted.’ Description: ‘Domostroy was guided by the auditory, and his art was music, which enlarged his spiritual world by demolishing ...”

“... and keep others at bay – tough farmers, poachers, DIY men and the like. Our Whitehall warriors may not look very impressive when – or if – they emerge from their bunkers. The American scenario in which the President and the top brass take to the air in special command aeroplanes seems more plausible. But it is a story that seems to end when the fuel ...”

“... in post-war Germany is more important than the there), and when to allow himself metaphor. It may be that his development as a poet can be best explained as a transference of allegiance to Eliot from Auden. Much of Terminal Moraine, notably those poems reprinted here in a section called ‘Exempla’, had the early Auden’s determination to test what ...”

“... meaning and the need for interpretation are so coercively suggested at almost every moment. But we may accept them as theatrical conventions, and still find something wrong here. And the trouble isn’t in the bizarre effects they achieve, but in what these are set against: the implied norms of natural behaviour. The oddities and excesses are what we ...”

“... arrested, the number executed was between four and ten thousand. Some of the contradictions may arise from the fact that most of this book consists of articles which he published in Der Spiegel during the four years he was in China. Certainly little effort seems to have been made to reconcile pieces written at different dates. Terzani deals well with ...”