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“... the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since then he has published no single full-length work of historical research. The editor of the volume under review says that ‘for over thirty years … he has served as the ...”

“... A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the point of pretending that his poem is a good one if it is not? But can the same honesty be expected of other people? Are not so many of life’s activities a means of escaping from self-knowledge? How many people could persevere, if they knew in their hearts they were quite unimportant ...”

“... somebody resting from a difficult job of labour.’ This is another loss of innocence, altogether more private than the death of the president, and altogether more real. Houston ‘felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was 18 years old.’ Later ...”

“... And as a result, everybody treated me like someone they could talk to.Journalistically, what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the ...”

“... commented that it sounded much like the writing of Gertrude Stein. Quite so; and how much more difficult it must be to recapture the character of talk before the 20th century. Most of the contributors to Mr Quennell’s volume grope around the problem and then turn to something else more tangible. Hilde Spiel writes ...”

“... that the appetite for reality TV on this side of the Atlantic has abated. Big Brother 4 received more applications than any of its predessors. The Sun – which, just when you think it can’t get any tawdrier, will pull another grubby hanky from its sleeve – has proffered a bounty of £50,000 to the first (straight) couple to have sex on the show. That ...”

“... McCain Bill, it’s now illegal for Americans to commit torture anywhere in the world: all the more reason to outsource it. Thanks to the heroic drudgery of a number of planespotters, there is documented evidence that these flights stop over in Britain. It makes you wonder if those planespotters who got into trouble in Greece a few years ago were arrested ...”

“... missing’. This is in apparent contradiction to Newcomb’s preface, where she writes: ‘The more I discovered about angels, I realised the less I actually knew about them.’ In answer to the frequently asked question whether or not they are ‘the messengers of God as the Bible claimed’, Newcomb says that ‘one of the translations of Angel is ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... novel contains two-thirds of the total text), shuffled to appear in random order. There must be more constraints than this, otherwise the number of possible versions would be far greater than 109 trillion, but I don’t know what they are. Balestrini has said there are only the two rules. Citing the magic number in his excitable introduction to a new ...”

“... saw as characteristic of an outdated system of government soon to be swept away by the Civil War. More recently, there have been ingenious attempts to link the two by arguing that Bacon’s reform of natural philosophy was part of a grand programme to strengthen the crown by placing the control of knowledge in the hands of royal institutions. It seems ...”

“... who didn’t write anything at all about his op-ed. I found all this tiresome, self-indulgent and more than a little embarrassing. Still, there must be many more for whom Goldberg’s obsessive return to his own humiliation is compelling, one of the reasons the book has moved up the bestseller charts so briskly. No matter ...”

“... every other aspect of this woefully misconceived adventure, the Coalition has ended up doing far more harm than good. The smothering of Babylon is symptomatic of the thoughtlessness – and the disregard for history, ancient and modern – that has characterised this war since its first devising. In the sixth century BC, the Babylonian New Year would be ...”

“... between the wartime austerity they labour under and the cornucopia he revels in. He’s no more despicably selfish than any other of the characters, however; perhaps less so – after all, he gave up on his fellow citizens only after they wouldn’t let him help them. Acharnians is in some sense an ‘anti-war’ play, but it’s not of course ...”

“... has made me wonder about old forms of timekeeping. Did they serve to make the passing of time more bearable? Did almanacs, with their cycles of the moon and the stars, red letter days and anniversaries, or breviaries and Books of Hours, with their feasts and saints’ days, help distinguish one day from the next ...”