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“... popular genre which has taken up an awful lot of shelf-space in recent years – the shedunit. Margaret Thatcher’s paramountcy remains ‘the only plausible answer’ after more than three hundred pages which have tracked the experience of the Eighties. ‘Scarcely any of the great institutions remained untouched by Thatcherism in its various ...”

“... of the human family’ or simply as ‘They’, or ‘Them’. The writer who does do that is Margaret Oliphant, whom Miller doesn’t mention, and whose novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is surely the most interesting and entertaining example of a woman writing about men in the 19th century.The novel tells the story of Miss Marjoribanks, and of her ...”

“... it is difficult now to find a copy of H.D.’s poems in an American bookshop, much less any of her lesser colleagues circa 1912. It is as if modernist poems had to die to give birth to modernist history; or, in a depressingly common reversal of priorities, the poems are relics with which to reconstruct lives. To me, an ex-Philadelphian, it seems that one ...”

“... for building a monumental thesis on the belief that ‘what awaits everyone to a greater or lesser extent’ is ‘tale-telling, treachery, back-stabbing, denunciation, calumny, defamation, accusation’. This is repeatedly stated rather than shown, and Fever and Spear reads like an incantatory essay. The Spanish jury who awarded it the Salambó Prize ...”

“... suggest the many approaches historians of women can appropriate from other areas of history. Margaret Forster’s is the most conventional of the four. Her subtitle is misleading: her thoughtful and interesting book is not a sociological analysis of rank-and-file provincial feminists, but collects together short biographies of eight well-known women who ...”

“... In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart ‘will come to such sights colder/By and by’. The child will one day find better reasons for her tears, including the fate of humankind, falling and falling again since its first lapse in Eden: ‘You will weep and know why ...”

“... enemies change. From 1940 to 1945, for instance, the enemy was Germany, Italy and (to a slightly lesser degree) Fascism. Russia (together with the Communism which that country purported to represent) was an ally. The small group of university-educated Communists, who thought that the best way to advance the cause of peace and socialism was to infiltrate the ...”

“... to Members’ Allowances, it’s not surprising that most MPs seem to have followed the example of Margaret Beckett, who confessed: ‘I just grabbed together the relevant things and bunged them into the Fees Office and left it to them to sort it out.’ So Gerald Kaufman, having spent £8865 on a Bang & Olufsen 40” BeoVision LCD TV, described by its ...”

“... Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch – at least not in public. Notwithstanding the party’s boosterish slogans of enterprise, freedom and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality ...”

“... His hero reached his conclusion all by himself, he insists. On the other hand, he didn’t tell Margaret about his conversion. If he had, says Anderson, ‘she would have lost all faith in his judgment of foreign affairs, and in her own favourable assessment of his merits.’ But when Mr Major returned to the Treasury as Chancellor, this time stepping over ...”

“... class seem to have been kept for sport or warfare. The Kelsalls point out from the diary of a lesser laird, George Home of Kimmerghame, that the enthusiasm for gardening and for household tasks meant organising other people to do things: planting, pruning and protecting plants were all things for which orders were given. We are a long way before the ...”

“... crafted descriptions in Eça de Queirós’s masterly novel The Maias, extremely well rendered in Margaret Jull Costa’s new translation. The novel is set in Lisbon in the 1870s: 1875 to 1878, to be precise, with a couple of flashbacks to establish the family history, and an epilogue placed in 1887, the year before the book was first published. It begins and ...”

“... frontier the following morning, and for a payment of $200, Brunson and Humphrys were happy to let lesser mortals onto the flight. The news at the Reuters office was less encouraging. A message had arrived from their correspondent in Santiago, suggesting that I would be ill-advised to come. My name was on a ‘wanted’ list. We flew in to Santiago’s old ...”

“... of Britain (‘Great’ not as a qualitative description, but merely to distinguish it from Lesser Britain, or Brittany) did nothing to reassure or restore the morale of his new subjects. The inevitable happened. People began to look back to a different past, the one presided over by Gloriana rediviva; and the Queen’s own strenuous self-propaganda in ...”

“... up the greater Churchill, who stood for national unity in the Second World War, against the lesser Churchill who was only too eager to put down strikes, and who – as depicted by Howard – was, of course, an indirect representation of Margaret Thatcher. It was not to be expected that Michael Howard’s achievements ...”