“... there. On-screen heroism was one thing, but: ‘Oh, you couldnie gan wi’ a sailor,’ my aunt said. ‘Folk thought that was terrible. They’d say: “Is that no’ awfie! She’s in the street wi’ a sailor.”’ She was laughing when she said this; partly because it was all so long ago, and partly at the snobbery ...”

“... by quoting the apparently prophetic observation of Margaret Drabble in 1974. Ever since she said it, there has been a run of near misses or all-buts, beginning with Another Lady’s completion of Jane Austen’s fragment ‘Sanditon’, and continuing with someone else’s notion of ‘The Watsons’. Then, in the autumn of 1977, there was an Austen ...”

“... acting companies and playgoing in 1600 is predictably impeccable, and nothing less could be said of Orrell’s account of the structure of the original Globe and the Inigo Jones designs for indoor theatres. The book’s scholarship, its commitment, its good intentions lie manifestly beyond dispute. However, there are difficulties.The first and most ...”

“... invariably highly remunerative career in the City, the opportunity for which has been repeatedly said to be entirely due to the ex-minister’s talents and to be unconnected in any way with any earlier ministerial position that he might possibly have held. As Lord Gowrie claimed when resigning from his post as Arts Minister in September 1985 to join ...”

“... it. Hayek’s argument, as Yergin and Stanislaw do not quite say, but as Keynes saw clearly and said very colourfully, strains credulity. He claimed that there is a ‘natural’ rate of interest. This is determined by the balance between people’s decisions to spend or to save. The more they save, the higher it is. Banks interfere with this rate at ...”

“... supporters to dismiss her as a vamp who had turned sour after Rhodes refused to marry her. They said he got on famously with ‘natives’ in his mines and with the Ndebele chiefs he had eventually talked into abandoning their rebellion. Civilised men must do harsh things when attacking a barbaric enemy guilty of the ultimate ‘sacrilege’: killing white ...”

“... it made apologies, we were left with no real sense of what exactly had been done. The situation said a lot about the power of the police and the power of the media to move the police to apology. Yet the story went deeper than that. What was it to live a second life? What was it to use a person’s identity – and did anyone own it in the first place? Is it ...”

“... than with evolution, and whose vision of ‘a natural science of society’ was, it has often been said, more taxonomic than analytical.* But the appearance is, I think, superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, as insisted by W.E.H. Stanner in his entry on Radcliffe-Brown in the 1966 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Radcliffe-Brown’s ...”

“... centred on the Fenian bombing campaign of the 1880s. ‘I won’t even try to explain,’ Conrad said in a note written in 1920,why I should have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which the author … reproduced a short dialogue held in the lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected anarchist outrage with the home secretary ...”

“... the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60. He goes up and he comes down. He was a man, as he said himself, of ‘tumbles and leaps’, a man of extremes, of moods and moments, and of the moment, of nerves, fresh starts and escapes, whose illness and convulsive life gained access to, if they were not inseparable from, an art nerved to resist them. He was ...”

“... argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific discourse. Each system, whether in botany, geology or comparative anatomy, gave identity and focus to a field of ...”

“... been confirmed by the formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company – a title of which it has been said that ‘it’s got everything in it except God.’ And indeed the many resemblances between Shakespeare and God have become commonplaces since the Romantic era. In practice, of course, the idea of his transcendence tends to reinforce conservative political ...”

“... of a mind coming to terms with itself. For Vendler, it appears, structure reminds us that what is said has been overseen, that thought has enjoyed reflection. Certainly, many of her chosen texts present reflective selves coherently coping with loss. It cannot simply be the tendency of American poets to drop dead in taxis, jump off bridges and gas themselves ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... there are a few from 1734-35, nothing from 1736. By 1738, Johnson is writing fairly frequently to Edward Cave, on business connected with the Gentleman’s Magazine. In the 1740s he is launched – from our point of view – as a letter-writer, with a circle of friends and acquaintances sufficient to elicit sequences of correspondence. The Johnson of ...”