“... become a major part Of Indian public finance. Their effectiveness in promoting social ends is at best abysmal,’ Joshi and Little argue, ‘at worst counter-productive.’ In the last two years of Rao’s Government, there was still no overall strategy, and little had been done to try to explain the reforms. The reason, as Joshi and Little say, is not far ...”

“... illicit authority, have recommended. It is this part of the programme that now appears to disturb Geoffrey Hartman, though he seems less worried about those threatened masterpieces than about the language in which literature, a category he has not himself entirely abandoned, ought to be discussed. Minor Prophecies is the ...”

“... and wholly new; and so, from a theatrical point of view, it was. It was merely ironic that the best thing in both plays had nothing to do with novelty, class or the current fashion, which was no doubt why it went unobserved. The manageress in Separate Tables does not succeed in keeping the husband she has annexed: the cool, dominant wife is actually ...”

“... is a librarian and a scholar (his ‘period’ is ‘somewhere between 1213 and 1215’), and the best efforts of his intellectual maturity have been happily applied to editing a Medieval text, the ‘Tretis of Love Hevenliche’, a work eventually destined for the dusty glory of Early English Texts Society publication. It’s not my period, but despite some ...”

“... is Figes’s particular strength. And yet it may also distort his picture. If he gives the best account of the war from the other side that there has been in English, he neglects its significance in British political history. First blood was shed over a religious conflict, but far from the Black Sea. Ancient rivalries between eastern Orthodox and Roman ...”

“... is peculiar to our local ways of living, and how much is determined by our shared animal nature? Geoffrey Lloyd’s book is the best recent overall summary of the state of play in the discussion of our social behaviour. The game? Nature v. nurture. That is a ‘convenient jingle of words’, as Francis Galton wrote in ...”

“... is always there but only occasionally glimpsed. The glimpses are instructive. In 1937 the diplomat Geoffrey Dennis wrote a Coronation Commentary for Heinemann. This was a reasoned defence of the monarchy – then in a very rocky state. Dennis repeated, and deprecated, the widespread gossip that Mrs Simpson had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before ...”

“... A year or two ago, Geoffrey Hartman urged literary critics to declare their independence. They should not regard criticism as an activity secondary to the literature it addressed, but as an art in its own right. Think of Pater, Valéry, Blanchot. Hartman’s advice seemed bad to me, and I preferred to abide by T.S ...”

“... knew, crossed swords with Hugh Trevor-Roper over the state of the Elizabethan aristocracy and with Geoffrey Elton over the question of Tudor despotism. Stone’s favourite theme at that time was ‘The Coming of the English Revolution’. Looking back from the later 17th century, Lord Clarendon once remarked that he was ‘not so sharp-sighted as those who ...”

“... about instead, I hope not unconscionably, was a matched pair of Ronald Searle plates for one of Geoffrey Willans’s Molesworth books, showing a Gaul marching on Rome and a Roman marching on Gaul. What one pencil-sucking hack at the poolside of the Bujumbura Novotel was heard to call Rwanda’s ‘ethnic cocktail’ could also be found in Burundi, albeit in ...”

“... Writing in the Tablet in 1951, Evelyn Waugh described Christopher Isherwood as the best of those British writers who had ‘captured’ the Thirties. It was not, Waugh being Waugh, high praise. Auden he felt to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill ...”

“... Athenian navies now chasing each other about the Aegean. It is in this anomalous eighth book that Geoffrey Hawthorn, until his death at the end of last year an emeritus professor of international politics at Cambridge, finds the truest and most revealing aspects of Thucydides’ thought. Here more than elsewhere, Hawthorn writes, one sees shifting ...”

“... Hypothesis: the proposition that people are ‘normal’, that with perfect knowledge they know best how to pursue their interests, that their efficiency in the use of information is absolute and that they know the true probabilities attached to all possible outcomes. Who could possibly believe that these are the conditions under which ordinary human beings ...”

“... in the syllabus. Perhaps, so far as the university system as a whole is concerned, it would be best for certain places well-equipped for the subject to make Anglo-Saxon a requirement, while others (perhaps the majority) offer it as an option, or not at all. If such a distinction between English departments were clearly understood in schools and ...”

“... Shine, an equally arty but commercially viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did; if a cat’d let me kiss it, I’d kiss it ...”