“... hurt side. ‘He built Fuseli, his gangster, on this ambivalence and wrote it for me.’ What may be just as significant is a part he played at Yale Drama School, not mentioned in the book: Solyony in The Three Sisters. Some student director, or perhaps a shrewd tutor, saw a lot of Solyony in the 21-year-old Anatolian Greek immigrant: a withdrawn, sullen ...”

“... south of England, particularly London, and from Yorkshire and points north. The London emigrant may well have started his wanderings elsewhere: he is a classic case of the fact that people become migrants in mind before they decide on their actual destination. These economic refugees, mostly men, went out in small numbers on ships doing miscellaneous ...”

“... and Winston Churchill (‘Why I’m voting for Maggie’). The actual authorship of these articles may be controversial but no complaint has been received from Messrs Stalin and Churchill, so the Sun is legally in the clear. In any case, the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who unswervingly supports Mrs Thatcher and is exceedingly rich. The Soaraway Sun ...”

“... book in the Spectator, ‘quarrelled as much as they did.’ He knows, he was there. But it may be that in Connolly’s case quarrelling was a natural extension of his endless capacity for self-pity. As for his wife, it was one of the things she did best, in life and in art. When Connolly was complaining about her to Edmund Wilson, he told him that she ...”

“... were due to his ‘disturbed relationship’ to his own mother, and then to add that ‘it may seem no accident that the most powerful and organised movement to correct this balance came from an analyst who was also a Jewish woman’ – Melanie Klein – is to adopt what might be called the Whig view of psychoanalysis: that it has become progressively ...”

“... by a systematic exclusion of blacks, women and migrants. Miles Franklin’s underlying vision may not differ all that much from the one contained in the celebrated final volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia, subtitled The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green, which shows what ‘grovelling’ to the British did for Australia between 1915 and ...”

“... God allotted to Caine’ – followed by his further assessment of its inhabitants: ‘These men may very well and truely be called Wilde, because there is no poorer people in the world.’ The image of destitute savages living in a frigid wilderness is the first stereotype that Brody tries to correct. He counters quotations of explorers through the ...”

“... average, and easily earned hero-worship from gifted (and not infrequently beautiful) young people, may, in a tiny proportion of cases, encourage a tendency to idleness, conceit and complacency. It is normal, as a survey in October 1994 indicated, for university teachers to work hard (although the reported 55 hours a week over a 48-week year strains ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress last fall and may lose them the White House next year.So the language of therapy and recovery is kicking in, if anything so bland and superficial can be said to have any kick at all. The words ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’ are never employed – perhaps from some exaggerated ...”

“... the continued vitality of the libertarian texture of early 20th-century British society. But this may have been more of a legacy from the past than an aspect of modernity itself and therefore have led her to underestimate the extent to which the acceptance of hierarchy and obedience to authority had become strongly internalised within all classes. What ...”

“... She sounded so like oneself, and yet she was dead, which gave her a necessary gravitas. She may have personified the Holocaust for millions of adults – the diary is the most widely read non-fiction book after the Bible – but for me, aged 12 or 13, she simply told the story of what it is like to be 12 or 13 in a world where no one seems to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”