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“... weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing less thrilling than Clovis Sangrail would do. In our envy we may have wondered sometimes if it were not much easier to be funny with tigers than with collar-studs; if Saki’s careless cruelty, that strange boyish insensitiveness of his, did not give him an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter. It ...”

“... in Britain and America. (Blake’s ‘Tyger’, first known to have existed in October 1793, may have drawn inspiration from the tiger’s ‘eyes darting fire’.) In the following decades, the death of Munro was recounted dozens of times, in volumes of natural history and books of instruction or cautionary tales for children. In A Short Description of ...”

“... Etymology doesn’t help us much here. Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different ...”

“... miners, dock workers, sports promoters and travelling showmen. Mary Collier, a washerwoman poet, may or may not have been a historical person, but the verse epistle published under her name is one of a series of 18th-century poems that describe working-class life and labour in a classicising form. Dic Aberdaron, an ...”

“... Biologists​  love abbreviations, but we often use them clumsily. What may sound like catchy acronyms to one group of researchers are tiresome jargon to colleagues in related fields. Fruit fly geneticists have taken whimsy to absurdity: MAD stands for ‘Mothers Against Decapentaplegic’. The ‘decapentaplegic’ bit comes from a mutant fly that doesn’t correctly form fifteen (deca-penta) important structures that go on to become legs, wings, antennae etc ...”

“... Africa is such that, by the time this review appears in print, the two books with which it deals may already belong to the past, both in their different ways witnesses to the haunted tensions, torture and bloodshed of the period of minority rule. The anthology of fiction, A Land Apart, was, say its editors, André Brink and J.M. Coetzee, ‘compiled amid the ...”

“... the man who creates to the pattern of his creation like the skin left behind by the snake? It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria ...”

“... question is seen to be, not whether the new approaches are valid, but how much of the old may be seen to have survived their onslaught. With one significant exception, these books do not attempt to turn back the tide of recent historical scholarship, but express a mood in which the chief interest lies in discovering which parts of the old shoreline ...”

“... only footsteps from Communism. Sir Ralf, however, argues that the attempt to remove anything that may be disagreeable – such as relatively high rates of tax – to the status of a constitutionally untouchable subject is in itself illiberal. ‘Whatever is raised to that plane is thereby removed from the day-to-day struggles of normal politics, until in the ...”

“... of a somehow better world for the real, mundane one of experience. The ‘improvement’, though, may frequently mean not better material conditions but, on the contrary, a strongly salutary clarification or intensification of things that brings with it the worst sufferings imaginable in the grimmest of permutations. The reality principle has a firm say in ...”

“... the 19th century – Vasari would have approved of such a commemorative initiative, and indeed he may have inspired it. Vasari was also the architect of the building itself. The lucid elevations, the combination of solemn grandeur and ceremony with rational order which they suggest, masked the stealthy despotism and expressed the new bureaucratic regularity ...”

“... king by ‘God’s abundant mercy’. Ethelbald’s reaction is not known, but kings of Mercia may well have thought that God had very little to do with the way they clung to power. One cannot help remembering an amiable letter written at about the same time to St Boniface, by the King of Kent. It says, fuzzily, how pleased the King is that Boniface is ...”

“... penal coercion (‘the Barrier of Steel’ of which Mrs. Thatcher spoke in an infamous speech of May 1979) look obvious enough. But the narrow – ‘realistic’ – focus on street crime adopted by ‘left realist’ criminologists – who are in other ways quite critical of Thatcherism – has now encountered some problems. One of these has been the ...”

“... when Vidal adds to or subtracts from earlier interpretations and legends. But even Civil War buffs may derive new ideas from this book, centring as it does on the politicians and civilians of devious, untrustworthy Washington. Readers of my own generation will remember all the pro-democratic propaganda of World War Two, derived from the Gettysburg ...”

“... expected them to do; they did what the government expressly wanted them to do – even though it may well be that the government was quite ignorant of the long-term consequences of the policies which it forced on the business community and on the productive industry of Britain.’ A long and valuable section seems to confirm all we have always secretly ...”