“... in Steedman’s case, perhaps, the moments of happiness before things began to go wrong. There may be, as she says, an element of psychoanalytic transference in all historical writing. But the story of one’s own childhood is peculiarly vulnerable to the slippage between history and ‘case-history’, in which fantasy and distortion are the raw ...”

“... There is no doubt that language offers irresistible ground on which class and generational battle may be waged in tones of measured common sense tuned to the innocently offended ear-drum. Of Professor Brian Cox much was hoped. His Black Paper past promised drills and canons, rote and rigour. The report’s chapter on literature teaching is dull: but the ...”

“... why no Kipling? The ‘authorities’ support one another, often repetitiously (thus one account may reappear in slightly different versions). Nothing objectionable in that: we’re not looking for ‘scientific’ evidence, although Williams uses it, along with evidence of other kinds. The two parts are as intimately complementary as verse and gloss in The ...”

“... is what you really meant; and penalise and punish the author accordingly. But elsewhere the censor may not bother to strip away the conventions; he may not even recognise that they exist. Art for art’s sake will mean nothing to him. The Satanic Verses may be a great work of art, the ...”

“... of the Ribbentrop-Molotov hyphen, while it is true that men like Mikhail Suslov and Mao Tse-tung may have gone to their graves thinking of the Leninist state as history exemplified, it is not believable that Edvard Gierek or Milos Jakes or any of the other ‘Vodka-Cola’ general secretaries (Erich Honecker partially exempted) thought anything of the ...”

“... plants to ferns, which is just the sort of thing that happens after a forest fire today. Disaster may even have a pattern, with mass extinctions happening about once every 26 million years. What causes extinction is not clear. There has long been a vague feeling among evolutionists that animals have a sort of planned obsolescence. They simply give up the ...”

“... his eight-year-old daughter. His first wife, assuming he had one and she was the same sort of age, may now be a millionaire, she may own a chain of shops or be a top civil servant or the wife of a duke: but her womb, according to Greer, will be the size of an almond and one thing she won’t have is an eight-year-old ...”

“... had not gone far into his Homer before he hoped that somebody would hang him, and the same wish may well have filled Mr Raban’s bosom: the subject is so enormous and it has been considered time out of mind from so many points of view – physical, metaphysical, oceanographical, navigational, as a place for battle, swimming, fishing, drowning, shipwreck ...”

“... expects, seem uncontroversial, even if some of the consequences – for example, vegetarianism – may remain unappealing. Since McGinn invites objections, I will offer a couple, doubtless cannon fodder for the professional philosopher. One concerns some of the exemplary (counterfactual) fictions. Thus: if it were the case that human females got pregnant every ...”

“... and joking about Nietzsche. Since the Zeitgeist business is so vigorous just now many may find Selbourne’s title and prophetic posture quite appealing. But I suspect even those with pronounced apocalyptic tastes will be liable to exhaustion en route to his particular revelation. There are no oases. Over 376 pages, every glimmer of emergent hope ...”

“... for starting the fighting. Different rules regulate the resort to armed force. The sceptic may question whether these rules are of any practical significance. In fact, they derive from a moral recognition that war might legitimate some killings but not necessarily every killing. Even in war, it is possible to avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering. In ...”

“... clear distinguishing attributes. Professor Cox-Rearick even speculates that the missing Mercury may be subsumed into the fully-clothed figure she identifies as Venus, on the grounds that Mercury, in an astrological context, is sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite, and ‘the unusual view of the goddess from the rear, which recalls the traditional ...”

“... straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are narrated by characters who may be cagey, volatile, fanciful, captious, even self-deceiving. In the past, John Fuller has been a cunning contriver of riddles on a small scale, but here the design is grander. The verse is protean and the reader, like Neoptolemos, must grapple with fickle ...”

“... marks your position in society, and that saying or doing the Right Thing at the Right Time may keep you in the conversation long enough to be remembered by the Right People. One senses that all these Gilberts want somehow to remain outside of the Inside, free to believe that they can remain superior to those they are seeking to emulate. They are ...”

“... Whether Napoleon when he landed near Antibes on 1 March 1815 indeed looked rompu historians may have determined: but certainly not with the help of Belloc’s mother, an Englishwoman who was born a little more than fourteen years later. In The Cruise of the Nona, however, Belloc declares that ‘time and again’ in childhood he was told the story of ...”