“... the impulse, he believed, which had created modern capitalism. ‘A decent bureaucracy may always be relied upon to bring all its members up to its standard.’ But ‘this says nothing about what this standard itself will be. That possible superiorities might in practice turn into actual inferiorities must be kept in mind throughout.’ There was ...”

“... surmise, that the terrors of Salem, stirred up half a century after this house servant died, may have arisen from systematic, institutionalised and accepted cruelty at a domestic level among the puritans, at least offers a context for the terrible internecine calumnies against innocent women and men by their own family, neighbours and – in Tituba’s ...”

“... did not understand them,’ Quiros (or maybe his poet secretary) wrote, ‘and to this may be attributed the evil things that happened, which might have been avoided, if there had been someone to make us understand each other.’ Sometimes they killed because to shoot and not kill would be a blot against their reputations as marksmen. It didn’t ...”

“... clustered round the shrine of Edward at the East end of the Abbey Church. The Diptych itself may well have been produced for devotional use by the King within the Abbey. The royal tombs are the most striking feature of the area round the shrine, but the Plantagenets sought more in the way of dynastic endorsement at the Abbey than the seemly disposition ...”

“... his role as Number Two. It is possible that we have not yet seen all the terms of this deal: Major may have promised to make way for Heseltine soon after the next election, win or lose – but such promises are seldom enforceable, as the examples of Hawke and Keating, Chirac and Balladur show. The net result of the whole exercise was to cut back the challenge ...”

“... New Englanders in the coming Millennium. They shake the confidence of pioneers. America’s Nature may be superior to Britain’s Culture, but the wilderness is dangerous, the weather inhospitable, the Indians often hostile. Crops fail, settlers quarrel, fanatics momentarily gain the upper hand, children and mothers die, success is elusive. The solitude of the ...”

“... which startled and alienated the students (fewer than at MIT although the $5 admission charge may have been a deterrent), who had come prepared to laugh at her jokes and applaud her bravado. Even before she arrived at Princeton, Paglia was giving out belligerent interviews to the student newspapers on the subjects of women’s studies (‘this feminist ...”

“... desperately achieved note of optimism. Whether or not this optimism is borne out by events, it may be assumed that Basil Davidson will remain a true friend to Africa: speaking his mind, getting it wrong sometimes, looking on the bright side, and staying involved. Peter Matthiessen, the accomplished author of numerous books of travel and of wry and terrible ...”

“... sense of Dracula as a fallen angel. Great love in its bafflement turns to great hatred; even evil may have its origins in strangled or thwarted generosity. Taken out of context, the proposition is decent, slightly soggy, well-intentioned but short-winded – try applying it to Goebbels or to the next apprentice vampire who wants to test his fangs on you. In ...”

“... who, according to a tradition Hughes doesn’t mention, ‘died a papist’ – the insight may not be original but it needs restating forcibly in a culture where Shakespeare is so often treated as a piece of Anglican heritage or as a second-rate Tory dramatist. It’s an applied insight which gains authority not just from the active excitement of ...”

“... wish to get some idea of the grandeurs and miseries of office, especially the miseries, that may await them on 10 April, they should take a careful look at this informative and incisive ...”

“... suggest a narcissistic personality who gradually lost touch with the external world. His diagnosis may not be clinically watertight but it does point up the sense in which Richard’s reign saw a triumph of the will over frequently unpromising material circumstances. Richard created for himself an iconic status which belied his unimpressive personal ...”

“... groups of that sort did exist in New York and also in Chicago. But the great ones, though they may have occasionally frequented these foyers, were usually about their business elsewhere. Think, for example, of Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens, both New England insurance executives and both doing the entirely unexpected things they chose to do, while ...”

“... the degree to which the documents really contained deeply held secrets, classified though they may be. He explained that the US government wasn’t so naive as to believe that information stored on a database to which as many as half a million people had access – one of whom turned out to be Private Manning – was likely to stay confidential for very ...”

“... in Housmanesque poetry: ‘’Tis only right you look to wed/Now you are grown and gone/And I may comfort me to think/The lads come on and on.’ The sexual availability of ostensibly heterosexual young men was as remarkable as Steward’s appetite – he doesn’t record being attacked, or even that his targets recoiled from his advances. This he put ...”