“... Herrnstein and Murray are part of the fin-de-siècle gloom movement whose adherents range from Edward Luttwak, writing powerfully in these pages on 7 April last year, to Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work. From an abstract point of view – the vantage point of those who have high IQs and some idle time – Herrnstein and Murray have quite the neatest ...”

“... shouldn’t be long now before the voters remind us that politics, as Rab had once so originally said, is the art of the possible. Having observed her arresting qualities of domination at the previous Conservative Party Conference, I had been ridiculed for writing, in the New Statesman, that she was a great fanged and clawed feline, replete with sex and ...”

“... into the darkness and saw a red glow in the hills opposite. She asked what it was, and her mother said in a grim voice, ‘They are putting fire to Lettaidh. The people have been put out.’ The child was frightened, naturally enough, especially since they had relatives in Lettaidh themselves, but she was reassured when her mother told her it would not happen ...”

“... moves from one demolition job to another, that his own arguments often contradict each other. That said, his book is extremely clever, precisely because of its tendentious manner, the most interesting of the four books published last year to cash in on the 80th anniversary of 1918.* The English are still more than half in love with the idea of the super-clever ...”

“... Huston, who directed the film version of Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the younger playwright Edward Albee who adapted, with limited success, The Ballad of the Sad Café for the stage. ‘Illumination’ is McCullers’s term for epiphany, inspiration, insight; ‘night glare’ her term for her illnesses, bad luck, and the loss of inspiration: ‘the ...”

“... Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous swells. They looked rather similar, something like Edward Elgar, and when they were in the House of Commons they worked together in a spirited, efficient and defiantly independent manner, never as lobby-fodder. Neither could be called ‘democratic’ or ‘anti-racist’; but Tap Bowles was always keen to praise ...”

“... is to pee on his father. He is truly to the manner born at this court, which resembles that of Edward VII in its mixture of rigid and often unfathomable rules (women waiting on the princess must wear their hair dressed upwards, only people of certain ranks are entitled to wear clothes of the ‘forbidden colours’) with simple-minded horseplay. During one ...”

“... tell her old husband: ‘He put the tip of his tongue between my lips and so mousled me – and I said I’d bite it. He’s a proper goodly strong man; ’tis hard, let me tell you, to resist him.’ Such boasts, as the gloating audience well knows, are not so reassuring to Messrs Pinchwife and Kurlander as their candid ladies think they are. Mr Kurlander ...”

“... did not give the right signals. The representation of employers was equally defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most ...”

“... the possible. That is the basis of Steel’s strategy. After the General Election of February 1974 Edward Heath, faced with the prospect of heading a minority government, discussed with the then Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe the possibility of some sort of coalition. But Steel reports that it was ‘the almost universal opinion’ of Liberal MPs that no such ...”

“... is still possible to argue, the finest of their period. Auden’s scrupulous editor and executor, Edward Mendelson, has invariably respected and supported the poet’s decisions, but manages to have it both ways by including in a separate volume, The English Auden, the original versions of poems that were later either revised or rejected. This expensive ...”

“... the scope of man’s intellect’, and politely fending off horrifying tributes like Edward Aveling’s attempt to dedicate to him a collection of evolution articles from the National Reformer, destined to appear in the ‘International Library of Science and Free-thought’ under the lively editorship of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. The ...”

“... pre-ordained republican assertion of independence from the British oppressor, much the same can be said of the revisionist school of Irish historians, as Alvin Jackson’s judicious essay on the historiography of Home Rule brings out. It thus becomes apparent as one reads this book that the device of focusing on the contingent nature of events serves to ...”

“... or turned away, they seem to look past the viewer at something outside the frame. Shapton has said that the format of Guestbook was inspired by the illustrated volumes compiled by Victorian spirit investigators (she wanted to capture ‘the mix of proof, shock and totally crappy images’) and the photos are alluring because of what they don’t show ...”

“... been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory Party. In the event, both Wilson and Thatcher agreed with Kilbrandon, that – in ...”