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“... and in many areas health indicators have collapsed to Third World levels or worse. The thesis of John Gray’s new book is that Green movements in the West have yet to come to terms with the implications of the socialist environmental disaster, and that when they do, they will turn naturally to ideas associated with the conservative defence of free ...”

“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...”

“... man to share a house with; he tells the Princesse Mathilde at one point not to be fooled by his ‘gross gendarme’s envelope’, that the least thing gets on his nerves and that he lives in greater dread ‘of a squeaking door than of being betrayed by a friend’ (a comparison speaking more to some of us than that made in an opposite direction by ...”

“... Brown was one of the convenor/editors of the Red Paper for Scotland in the early Seventies, and John Lloyd saw the inside of the Communist Party before helping to found a pro-European Marxist tendency at about the same time. Rather touchingly, he uses the chorus of the ‘Internationale’ to supply the chapter headings of his ‘CounterBlast’, which is ...”

“... on land at Crécy (1346, followed by the capture of Calais in 1347), at Poitiers (1356, where King John of France was taken prisoner, and which Sumption reconstructs superbly), and the Black Prince’s final ‘disastrous’ victory at Nájera in Spain (1367). The story also has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the ...”

“... like the dreadful Vodi, despoilers of life, who work for Nelly, the witch with pointed teeth, in John Braine’s best novel, The Vodi, which appeared in 1959. Such demonic fantasies are quite common, I think, when young men are locked in a long-running conversation in, say, barrack-rooms or hospital wards. In Pinter’s case, the fantasy of ‘the ...”

“... too much money. Patrick’s defence and successive appeals were paid for by his brother-in-law John T. Milliken, who had married Patrick’s beautiful sister May. Milliken had telegraphed Patrick’s counsel at the beginning of the case: ‘One million dollars, if necessary, for Patrick’s legitimate defence.’ As the case wore on and the defence case ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... The novelist wavered, and records that his decision was partly influenced by hunger. For a ‘gross character’ like himself, the Europe of ration-cards was intolerable. Another deciding factor was that his mother, who professed always to hate Australia, was resolved to live in England when the war ended, and the son ‘knew ... my mother and I could not ...”

“... Romantic movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of ...”

“... at home from Latin, the language of the learned fathers. In the 14th century, the translator John Trevisa wrote that nurses ‘whilispith and semisouneth the wordis’ (‘mispronounce and semi-sound the words’) to the child. Mother Tongue is alert to the relationship between words and mothering. In Making Babies, Anne Enright writes that ‘all words ...”

“... to the orthodox Christian Church. If all sinners were to be saved, what is the reward of virtue? John the Baptist would be treated no better than the Devil. If the mildly good were to be confused with the very good, the favoured status of ascetic monks would disintegrate. Under Origen’s regime – horror of horrors – brothel-keepers would eventually ...”

“... trade formed but a small part of the total of economic activity – at most 2 per cent of the Gross National Product, which is certainly not enough to explain either the growth of European prosperity or the imposition of European hegemony over the rest of the world. In his Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism (published, a trifle ...”

“... we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his pitiably meagre possessions; in the process ...”