“... Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches.’ When Ralph thinks he may be just an ‘instrument’, he is right in more ways than one. It’s this that should make questionable Fourth Estate’s rather opportunistic claim that Derek Beavan ‘tackles the issue of recovered memory’. In a way of course Ralph does sound like one ...”

“... must be conducted within three hundred metres from the shoreline. Britons on holiday may have sampled these specialised marine spas. They will certainly have noticed that the best of the old inland spas of Europe have looked after themselves singularly well, making the most of their setting, climate and relaxed attitudes, even if in the off ...”

“... small-minded newspapers like the Daily Mail: these are the villains of the Wilde story, but they may have more in common with us than its hero. Homophobia, for instance, is a modern phenomenon: before Wilde, there was really no such figure as the homosexual. Victorian men could be intimate without being labelled Mary-Anns, Inverts, Uranians or ...”

“... and regulate social life by working through civil society. Despotically ‘strong’ states may be infrastructurally ‘weak’, and vice versa. What is urgently needed in Russia today – and throughout the ex-Communist bloc and the Third World – is an infrastructurally strong state, one that can keep the peace, punish force and fraud, enforce ...”

“... of the peace treaty. An American military government followed, and Independence, celebrated in May 1902, rested on a Constitution which included the so-called Platt Amendment giving the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever necessary for ‘the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual ...”

“... The first four went, on a six-month temporary transfer, in July. The timing of the second batch may have been cack-handed, but the transfers were nothing to do with the ceasefire. How difficult would it have been to check the facts? Could the Guardian leader-writer not have consulted the reporter on his own paper who had first written about the transfers on ...”

“... understand that you simply can’t leave the Politburo and Council of Commissars to Kuibyshev (he may start drinking) or to Kaganovich for long?’ Molotov had to return from vacation early, and Stalin with rare politeness remarked that this made him ‘a little uncomfortable’. Stalin could rely on Molotov’s complete loyalty. In the long series of ...”

“... Mile’s cosmopolitan culture: 35 per cent of its leading firms employed foreigners. The City may have been chauvinistic, but it was not exclusive or insular. It was the latest and perhaps the greatest manifestation of the national myth that Britain’s world supremacy stemmed from her enterprising, outward-looking, seafaring and tolerant character. No ...”

“... but as political criticism. We label Coleridge and Hazlitt psychological critics. Coleridge may have been the first to use the word ‘psychological’ in its modern sense, but to contemporaries Hazlitt was something very different: a Jacobinical critic. His book was damned by William Gifford, the most powerful London editor of the day, as a seditious ...”

“... and ‘clay-thick with misery’, the poet falls silent yet again. There is nothing between May 1949 and January 1950. In this month, Larkin’s first really spectacular development takes place. In ‘At Grass’ the theme is still to do with ‘what has pleased and passed’, but the subject is thoroughly out there: retired racehorses perhaps plagued ...”

“... its position and overtake the Alliance as the only contender against the Tories. The short-cut may look attractive but is likely to prove a cul-de-sac. We must not allow ourselves to be diverted from our main task, which is to improve our own direct appeal to the voters. Our salvation lies in our own hands. So, in the absence of a short-cut, how do we ...”

“... influence on public perception of the novel; because if it continues to increase in power it may well end up Thatcherishly producing two nations of novelists; and because it distracts novelists from their novels (it’s hard to realise, after the caravan has passed, that your book is just as good or just as bad as it was before it made the baggage-camel ...”

“... minutes that have been made available, one can only speculate on the cause, which in both cases may have something to do with covert operations. Most of the Service files are closed, and so are almost (though not quite) all the files dealing with psychological warfare, on which a great deal of reliance was misplaced. The Protocol of Sèvres, which to ...”

“... Golden Lane where the cows were kept in the back of the premises, under roof. (Fresh the product may have been, but not necessarily pure. Jackson mentions the water pumps that were kept in cow yards to dilute the milk.) Scharf was particularly engrossed by the grand-scale demolition and building projects which, once the nation had recovered its prosperity ...”

“... a reserve squadron of the SAS. Prince Charles, who steered the Benjamin Bowring on her first lap, may have wished that his own tours in support of trade and the flag could be organised with similar lack of protocol. An unsparing account of old-fashioned princely progresses is to be found in The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922, describing tours ...”