“... overcrowded with mahogany furniture’ described in South Riding (‘solid comfort’, Mrs Beddows said). It was a world in which, as Muriel discovers in Holtby’s second novel, The Crowded Street, the only possible life for a woman was marriage, and if you wanted something different, you had to get out. In October 1919, she went back to Somerville to finish ...”

“... true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got ...”

“... ally: the tomblike secrecy in which government was then conducted. The American sociologist Edward Shils pointed out that ‘the British ruling class is unequalled in secretiveness and taciturnity … No ruling class discloses as little of its confidential proceedings as does the British.’ Nothing leaked: not the lies the government told about how ...”

“... a single stray aside, seems to be that for Runciman the royal administrations of Hammurapi and of Edward the Confessor exceeded those of a patrimonial ruler. This is scarcely persuasive. Was the staff at the disposal of Henry VII, or the House of Avis, really less? Patrimonialism, one is forced to conclude, the least anchored of modes in the subjacent ...”

“... up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they surprisingly called ‘Platonism’: ‘the doctrine that the region between the earth and ...”

“... poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.’ Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry, when I read it as a teenager, left me even more baffled since I had no idea ...”

“... was a gesture which they felt they should make and were glad to make,’ an Irish official said.) There was a state funeral in Dublin. The coffin was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement ...”

“... and calling herself his ‘wife’. ‘My phantom slowly took on a bodily shape,’ Beauvoir said of the United States on the plane returning home. ‘I was happy when its heart was beating like a real human heart. Now, it’s becoming disembodied with dizzying speed.’ The American disembodiment was her own. Paris, she wrote to Algren in her first ...”

“... had not prepared them to hurry up, finish their studies and take ship to Vietnam.It’s often been said since that these young men would not have been bothered by the war if it were not for their own impending draft notices, and that they were quite prepared to let the underclass be conscripted in their stead. This is quite simply a slander. The arguments and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”