“... 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 ...”

“... moved towards an enlightened pluralism – ‘I pursued … a slightly rebellious policy,’ he said in a radio interview that same year. Ogilvie describes such statements as ‘self-promotion’. ‘This is not to ascribe mendacity to Burchfield,’ she insists, yet ‘his claims for what he had done … simply were not true.’ She is not accusing him of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... merchants there, a role that soon involved him in the complexities of trade and diplomacy between Edward IV and Charles, Duke of Burgundy. In 1471, after falling foul of English dynastic politics during the brief readeption of Henry VI, Caxton went to Cologne, a city with which he may have been familiar from his business connections. There had been a press ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... humanities appointment in Scotland: the chair in moral philosophy at Edinburgh. It has to be said, however, that Professor Wilson was an even more fictitious character than Christopher North. His appointment was a political one, and Wilson remained indebted, throughout his academic career, to the silent assistance of Alexander Blair, an old college ...”

“... of that scientifick difference for ever after . . . “Hierarchy?” offered I. “elysium,” said he.’ Gould sees his taxonomic duties as a worrying attempt ‘to re-create the natural world as a penal colony’. But he’s had worse offers, so he plays along. So much for Enlightenment Rationalism and the Progress of Science. All this continues for a ...”

“... the ‘powerful grip that genes have recently come to have on the popular imagination’. Having said which, Keller acknowledges that gene talk has not yet outlived its usefulness and raises the question of what it is actually for. The ‘gene paradigm’, in its seductive simplicity, plays an important rhetorical role, genespeak having long become a ...”