“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were crammed into a single week that general theatre criticism is difficult. One conclusion may be that the société du spectacle itself is in serious trouble. It has become infinitely less dependable than the assorted VIP impresarios believed back in June. After six months of star preview, G8 July was launched amid horizon-beckoning packages; by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray hints at a close connection with his revelation, in the caption ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”