“... we were more like Sweden, only 20 per cent more like the United States. Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher may not call an election until late 1987 or early 1988, and even then, whereas the Conservatives only have to have 35 per cent of the total vote to be sure of being called by the Queen, and Labour 36, the Alliance has to have 41. The two old parties, even ...”

“... does not automatically, as many have expected, wipe out old feuds and prejudices: new mass media may harden them instead. He details the growth of the road network, enabling the farmer to bring his produce to the market and to move about and meet others, and the spread of literacy and publishing: all this has been amplifying public excitements, ‘changing ...”

“... major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis wandered from Trotskyism into the ‘bourgeois deviationism’ of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The heteroclite ruminations ...”

“... to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist ...”

“... coal mines. But we’ll brandish our sensitivities proudly (if not our safety pins, which may be too smug and lame a gesture), since they’re what we’ve got, and are anyway better than robotic numbness, better than ‘normalisation’. Yet figuring exactly which pretzel-shape to twist our sensitivities into – I’ll pity those who revile me, for ...”

“... In a spirited attempt to forestall criticism, Margaret Doody warns her readers that they may ‘feel horrified at what they they regard as a changeling-substitution of a mad Gothic feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in Evelina and the Journals, Professor Doody sets out to present an altogether different version ...”

“... of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring the new growth of leaves.’ There is almost a Bethlehem feel about this: a new light in the sky and various ...”

“... on Victorian and modern literature are published now. The theoretical essays will come out next May. Born in 1928, Miller took his first degree in science. He converted to literature as a graduate and was steeped in New Criticism during its most doctrinaire phase. He describes his emancipation from its discipline as something comparable to Dorothea’s loss ...”

“... than Woolf. Her father was a housemaster at Harrow, and her education – highly privileged, as we may now think – was curiously similar to Woolf’s, for it was undertaken, more or less alone, in her father’s library. She was prodigiously literate and seems to have acquired the kind of social assurance that allows the possessor the privileges of candour ...”

“... the fear that the country is winding down and losing its competitive vigour, and the fear that it may fall apart. This tension has, if anything, become more acute. In the Democratic Party contest between Hart and Mondale we saw a growing concern among party supporters that the two candidates’ attacks on each other were ‘tearing apart the party’. Yet, as ...”

“... and Vivaldi’s concertos, Scarlatti composed the same piece six hundred times. The pattern may be similar, the bipartite structure with its double bars and repeat marks may be the same. The content is never the same and rarely even similar. Handel is, of course, better-known than this. Or is he? The Water Music and ...”

“... books to him. Cooper infers that Walsingham ‘drank deeply from the wellspring of reform’ and may have been implicated (with other members of his family) in support for Lady Jane Grey and in Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary of 1553-54: perhaps this was one of the reasons he fled England shortly afterwards. No less formative was the St ...”

“... it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot. Roosevelt initially agreed. It was Stalin, who had found that trials could be exceedingly satisfactory in both ...”

“... be dialogical: we must aim to achieve consensus through debate and conversation with others who may have adopted interpretations different from our own. We must therefore not only give weight to our fellow citizens’ views in the decision-making process, but also construct a political and social system that delivers the conditions without which they could ...”

“... the knowledge that you have unknown enemies lurking in the shadows hasn’t changed. Such attacks may have serious consequences, and this is formally recognised. Like their numberless digital counterparts, assaults on paper are a criminal offence. The Malicious Communications Act (1988) makes it illegal in England and Wales to ‘send or deliver letters or ...”