“... become ‘things’: the attempt to remove a terminological distinction between men and women may turn both into an object, as when ‘chairman’ and ‘chairwoman’ are replaced by ‘chair’. Such phenomena are part of the rough-and-tumble of linguistic change and a fair price to pay for legitimate social objectives. My concern is not with the fact ...”

“... it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes feel. Miss Didion, however, has come out. She stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result ...”

“... any social explosion great enough to change people’s lives ever can be. Paradoxical though it may seem, the lasting importance of the Affair was not all that much to do with Alfred Dreyfus, who, after his release, fought well in the war and then lived a quiet and unremarkable life until his death in 1935. Jean-Denis Bredin has provided us with what will ...”

“... Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not longer, American colleges and universities were virtually built or shaped by strong-willed presidents backed by admiring, powerful lay boards of trustees into whose ...”

“... Arthur at his Sheffield Camelot. Routledge was spurned in 1983; it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that the strike, far from representing an upsurge of working-class militancy, was ‘all about one man’ (as ...”

“... in English. I think the American ‘deep image’ school, writing poems with a small vocabulary, may think they are doing something comparable. But I don’t understand how people with a basically uncomplicated relationship to their own blameless language can think they are learning from Celan. ‘What a game!’ he once said, of ...”

“... since is only marginally connected to the sexual adventures of top Tories. The word ‘sleaze’ may be new, but the concept is not. British political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is ...”

“... at exactly the moment when his ‘Post-Modern’ disciplinary grandchildren would be all agog. It may be that in all this lies part of the explanation of why ‘Java Project Two’ in the once pristine ‘enchanted oasis’ of Sefrou, nestled beneath the High Atlas range, did not result in a Religion of Morocco. As Geertz mournfully writes, in 1963 ‘the ...”

“... have had enough struggle to last a lifetime. The resulting mood is unmistakable. At the biggest May Day meeting on the Reef, held at the Rand Stadium in Johannesburg, the regional premier, Tokyo Sexwale, the ANC party boss, Cyril Ramaphosa, and the Secretary General of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), Sam Shilowa, launched bitter attacks ...”

“... to know at what point his early love of Firbank turned into ‘genuine piety’ (whatever that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This ...”

“... From 1988 to 1990 he was President of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, which may be a less grand assembly than it sounds. Final Exit is his ‘book for the Nineties’. Humphry targets his readership carefully. He distinguishes between what he calls ‘emotional’ and ‘rational’ suicide. His book has a covering note reminiscent of a ...”

“... blew up as they were fishing at Cuan à Bhòcan, the Sea of the Ghosts, south of Barra Head, on May Day 1897. Highland folk know very well that many of their forebears left their homelands by choice. So why had Chrissie said that her forebear Mary Ann MacNeill (née MacCormick) was ‘cleared’? Those last islands had been drawing me for most of my ...”

“... Eastland of Mississippi and Sam Ervin of North Carolina – mobilised opposition. (Ervin’s role may surprise those who remember him only for his principled part in the Nixon impeachment investigation. But before that he was mostly known as an outspoken opponent of racial integration.) As with the Lodge amendment, black leaders outside the South joined the ...”

“... a quick beheading could work wonders. Unlike Edward though, Henry was something of a prude – he may have had six wives, but it’s hard to name more than a handful of his mistresses, and whereas Edward revelled in ribaldry, Henry largely stuck to chivalric masques and tales of the Knights of the Round Table.At a political level, Henry VIII – unlike his ...”

“... because in her imagination (as in late James, though not in Woolf or Mansfield) love’s object may be worthy, and consummation isn’t only for dreams. There’s always irony, but there’s also always more than irony:‘I say, Rachel, I tell you a thing we might do –’ …Rachel wound herself up in her muffler by way of a protest. She had a funny ...”