“... 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 ...”

“... librarian Ianthe Broome. The parish of St Basil, on the fringe of North Kensington in NW London, may not be classic Austen country, but the principal characters, all off-spring of deceased Anglican clergymen, might be the equivalents of Jane herself. Like any Austen novel, An Unsuitable Attachment makes a cluster of courtships an occasion to uncover the ...”

“... Critique et Vérité (1966). These books make the issues plainer, and Barthes’s book is, if one may so put it, a classic defence of Modernist criticism, though a great deal has happened since 1966. ‘Deconstructionist’ criticism differs greatly from structuralism: one respect in which it does so is material to the present discussion. Since the ...”

“... of the lazy sod, the sod beneath the skin. Delaying isn’t an activity, with hidden meanings that may be of interest: here, it’s a gap in nature, or a sign of complete inactivity. This seems an increasingly unattractive line to take, usually emanating from people unable to grasp that some kinds of ‘work’ are pathological, and that a life that cannot ...”

“... by what lay behind these characteristically English defences, this selection of his letters may come as a disappointment. When Waugh died in 1966, the outside world possessed little reliable information about the nature of the beast inside the baroque carapace. Only occasionally would the monster come out of his lair: sometimes in print to deride ...”

“... taken by historical research are indicative of a nation’s broader preoccupations, then we may have to prepare ourselves for a religious revival of some magnitude. Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to ...”

“... his acquaintance with Acts, here his most surprising, most decisive source. Whatever scholars may dig up (and scholars have more or less appropriated Golding since Lord of the Flies, after running its fantastic popular course, ended up in the classrooms of the world) he had almost to excess that qualification epic poets were once urged to acquire, and ...”

“... are stored, and if in the case of twins the Assigner of Souls has the option of making two, clones may suffer because (presumably without foresight) the appropriate soul has already been given away. Yet however mysterious the ways of the Almighty, I doubt that any of those who are troubled about life after Dolly are thinking along these lines. Kolata’s ...”

“... Visiting Perth in May 1922, D.H. Lawrence struck one May Gawlor, who met him at a literary picnic, as a cross between ‘a reddish bearded able-bodied seaman and a handyman at the backdoor’, so that she wondered ‘how this rather shabby, slightly coarse, far from spruce and tidy little man could possibly have caused such a flutter, apart from his books ...”

“... the grieving mother’s kidnapping, the Peacocks adopted the abducted little girl, who was renamed May and absorbed into the Peacock family, half sister, half servant? Johnson keeps a careful eye on May in the background of Mary Ellen’s more thrilling story. Spoiled, pretty, intelligent Mary Ellen complains about her ...”