“... relatively little, and that little lacks the commonly recognised characteristic of major status – a distinctive philosophy expressed in a distinctive manner.’ In the most recent collection of Helen Simpson’s sophisticated stories about housebound wives, teenage girls and (above all) babies, a schoolgirl one spring day meditates on the ...”

“... But there was still room on the middle ground of politics for alternative positions. In his first major speech as leader, his address to the SDP’s 1983 Salford Conference, David Owen articulated his own understanding of the social market. The principles had been embodied in the Gang of Four’s Limehouse Declaration of 1981 and in subsequent policy ...”

“... superfluities and going straight to essentials, this book is a fine example of the late style of a major historian and of his capacity to relate great works of art to the social and political world surrounding them. The illustrations are well chosen, well reproduced, and there are more than a hundred of them. The book is a pleasure to handle and to read. My ...”

“... its textile (though not heavy) industry, in its literary and academic output, in the scale of its major buildings, and in the documentation generated by its bureaucrats, which were at least as spectacular in relation to preceding patterns as developments in the 16th century. In particular, the onset of the aggressive expansion which is Europe’s most fateful ...”

“... infirmity. After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson – ‘it was around the clitoris that they made major discoveries.’ Sex is a problem because it is no longer supposed to be a problem. ‘Throughout history men have boasted of their conquests, and in liberated ages, women too,’ writes Gathorne-Hardy: ‘this is the first time conquerors and conquests have ...”

“... episode, a virulent illness attacking the body politic. It is of course vain to hope that the major English novelists did any better by large thoughts or by liberalism. Miss McCarthy is damagingly convincing on one point, that English 19th-century novelists were altogether weaker on concepts than their Continental colleagues. George Eliot, one of our ...”

“... controls that I had to drive home with one hand. I observed that playing these strange games was a major pastime in LA. Aguy in the Westwood arcade once said to me, as he took the controls: ‘Now let’s get down to some serious Pacman here.’ Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is more of a minority interest out there on the West Coast. Doing both seemed a ...”

“... expectation that other libraries will eventually report their own holdings. In the past the only major library to have publicised its erotica, to the extent of freely letting the public know what it had, was the Bibliothèque Nationale, the contents of whose Enfer, the French term for bibliothecal exile, are listed in its general catalogue. Only in the last ...”

“... William Lilly was the first to produce a major textbook of astrology in the English language, at a time when the truth of astrology was almost universally recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations ...”

“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... of the Irish Citizen Army, ostensibly for just this purpose; and since the Citizen Army played a major role in the Easter Rising, it is possible to see Shaw as having helped to engender the event. Though he did not directly approve of the insurrection, he correctly predicted that the execution of its leaders would transform Irish public opinion. Twenty or so ...”

“... every night it sometimes seemed – and observe the red knees of the girls. ‘So good. A major classic,’ she had told a friend in high school of The Castle, which she hadn’t read. At that point she strongly felt she had read books she had only heard of, for imagine her getting this far in the first place! Plus she just loved castles, they were so ...”

“... In this, the first major biography of Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Brigitte Hamann tries very hard to be fair to a subject who, one might think, scarcely deserves it. It would be hard to find a better example than the Wagner dynasty of the continuity between the myth of a glorious Germany and its terrible enactment ...”

“... processes compel it to change its stance (as in the case of the legislative amendment proposed by John McCain and adopted by the US Senate, which caused the Bush administration to change its actions and commit more clearly to international obligations placing limits on the interrogation of detainees). Goldsmith and Posner do not discuss any of this. Their ...”

“... in early 2004, now with an updated post-election foreword – comprises biographies of the major Bush women and their doings. The title page calls it ‘Tales of a Cynical Species’, probably only unintentionally suggesting that Bushwomen are not human beings. They are, at any rate, traitors who lend their gender to the enemy to befuddle their ...”