“... Some of these experiments – on people who were rarely in any position to resist – may now appear justified. Ronald Ross, a British doctor, carried out some of his research on the relationship between mosquitoes and malaria in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands, work that helped win him a Nobel Prize in 1902. ‘With tears and toiling ...”

“... if she were to ‘live in some convenient place without possessing of her kingdom, where she may not move any new troubles’ – ideally, an English prison, far from the coast. Her trial for complicity in Darnley’s murder, which Elizabeth authorised, was ostensibly a ‘conference’ between Mary and the Scottish lords who were calling for her ...”

“... the enemy of churches. The Salisbury diocese has a history of wrong-headed deans. These gentlemen may have been top god-botherers but that was no reason to let them loose on one of the finest buildings in the world (exterior only). Thirty years ago, Hugh Dickinson proposed knocking down a Grade 1 listed wall to admit tourist coaches and so increase revenue ...”

“... game was up. I’m like Grampa Simpson in the meme: Old man yells at cloud. One of these days I may even start using relatable myself.The most profound recent generational change, for Duffy, has nothing to do with technology: delayed adulthood. Important life stages, such as leaving home, getting a stable job and moving into a place of one’s own, are ...”

“... This wasn’t a time of ‘investor-citizens’ but of ‘investor-consumers’; their emergence may have been accelerated by the Thatcher government, but it was essentially the result of changes in the structure of capitalism.The rise of financial consumerism was shaped by a supply-side logic. Companies struggled to make a profit by catering to small ...”

“... wasn’t what it used to be, and I shouldn’t expect to hear from anyone that year. It was May. In twelve months, eighteen months, he said, someone would offer me a date for surgery.Twelve months seemed unfathomable. If I had been hit by a car, they would have treated me right away. But afterwards I thought that even eighteen lost months were less ...”

“... in Finland, sounds rather boringly British. William, too, was English in his own way, which may have been one of the things about him that Evelyn Waugh admired. He borrowed from him too. In this highly fascinating and erudite biography Dido Davies notes some of the echoes of Jazz and Jasper in Vile Bodies. Gerhardie’s Lord Ottercove, based on the ...”

“... and temporally concrete moral claims.’ In British society the new or newish other elements that may be altering perception of death and its management include Aids (which, as Porter says, is bringing generations polarised by age into the common predicament of prolonged terminal illness); the cultural pluralism brought about by immigrant communities who do ...”

“... the point is rather that he is actively hostile to the idea that the real substance of our lives may be unique. Pinkney refers to Williams’ novel Loyalties, * where the Communist Emma Broase puts the point briskly: ‘You see ... it is this Freudian stuff. Subjectivity before class, it’ the whole post-war rot.’ Suspicious of the tentative uncertainties ...”

“... aim of Khomeini, and the smashing of his nuclear potential before it is too late. Saddam Hussein may simply decide to wait the Americans out. That basically was Nasser’s tactic. Or he might really decide to live or die an Arab hero by taking over Jordan, confronting the Israelis, and asking the ‘Arab nation’ where it stands or whether it ...”

“... the puzzling comment: ‘Nothing is lost by guesswork except the author’s own touch.’ Kalstone may be a little easygoing at times in the conduct of his argument, but he’s never as laid-back as that! What has been lost, most regrettably, is a resolution of themes taken up and developed in an occasionally rather loose and loquacious way throughout the ...”

“... of the great jail-break of Eastern Europe, and perhaps see the President of the USSR greeted on May Day with the words ‘Christ is risen, Mikhail ...”

“... It is pointless to guess at the future when events press so hard and when, within a year or so, we may know whether Malan’s vision is true. Twenty years ago – it is also relevant to recall – the sociologist Heribert Adam put up the theory that the Afrikaners had an unacknowledged genius for pragmatic flexibility: far from being ideological ...”

“... accidental meeting with his daughter, who has not (as he supposes) come to see him. Remittance men may not have disappeared off the face of the earth, but they are no longer commonly found in fiction. An interview between a man and his wife’s lover about arrangements for the separation leads to a moment of self-discovery which takes its force from the ...”

“... or the buttocks of a pubescent baby-sitter. Alcohol was rarely described in Klegg’s work, and he may himself not have recognised it as the element which kept his world in perpetual centrifugal motion. This funny, ungenerous evocation of the ‘American Kafka’ is surely a version of Raymond Carver, the ‘American Chekhov’, as transmogrified by ...”