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“... so proudly as to approve the abolition of academic study lacking in immediate ‘relevance’. Peter Acton throws out a red herring on page one – ‘agriculture was the real capitalism, contributing to social inequality’ – but agriculture and class analysis are both wilfully absent here. Poiesis is a book about making things and selling ...”

“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... to follow. These furthermore are ‘Cambridge histories’ in the classic sense, laid down by Lord Acton a century ago: general editors co-ordinate a series of chapters on related topics, each written by an authority in the field it defines. Academic culture today teems with multi-author volumes, many no more than the proceedings of particular conferences; and ...”

“... and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it his business to know people whom he thought worth knowing’. He dissociates himself from what he calls ‘the vacuum-cleaner school’ of biographers, but remains defiant about ...”

“... value in explaining the historical ascendancy of Liberal ideas: ‘the faith in liberty of Mill, Acton and Morley was the product of an exceptional period in British history when reason did actually seem to prevail over force and political problems could be solved by counting heads rather than breaking them.’ If this seems a rather idealised picture, he is ...”

“... briefly flirted half-heartedly with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists herself. ‘Prod’ – Peter Rodd, her quite fabulously dull husband – ‘looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh years later, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then, and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’ Fans of Nancy Mitford have her novels, her ...”

“... it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte blanche. The free-for-all continued, with neither local nor Parliamentary government overseeing London’s growth, until the setting up of the London ...”

“... point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary generation. He was a mixture of Pan and Peter Pan. Clive Fisher, who has written a very good book on Noel Coward, was quite right to give this elegant study the subtitle ‘A Nostalgic Life’. Being Anglo-Irish helped the nostalgia. Connolly senior had been a Major in the British Army and when he ...”

“... Friedman, on his first trip to Europe, looked distinctly under-age. Hayek had thought of it as the Acton-Tocqueville Society: others favoured Burke and Smith; the free-market solution was to call it after the mountain on which it convened. The Mont Pèlerin Society offered an escape from the dreary post-war Britain of food rationing and exchange controls into ...”

“... the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green and did a series of studies from there with Peter Willmott and others, there was simply no adequate information on what most people might want from politics. This research – done, it is true, in the South-East, away from the areas of heavy industry – strengthened his conviction that there were no ...”

“... think that, in the end, I shall go to Trevelyan’s enemies, Hilaire Belloc or Lord Acton, both Catholics, for an understanding of modern England.’ Belloc wrote no autobiography: he felt it was not really a gentlemanly thing to do; autobiographers usually offered too little or far too much. His now hackneyed and rather inferior quip ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”

“... all began to take on some credence once more. The last, especially, though a marginal theme of Peter Wright’s book (he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about: Wilson was obviously a rotter), rocked people’s trust in MI5. That could be taken to justify the secret services’ strategy all along. Any publicity would inspire paranoia, which they ...”

“... this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings ...”