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“... Davie is fond of ferocity, and I think of Eliot angrily asking his liberal theologian friend Paul Elmer More whether his God was some kind of Santa Claus. Davie’s eloquent disagreement with E.P. Thompson allows us to see the strength of Davie’s uncompromising position, and also to see what he himself won’t see ...”

“... fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X ...”

“... brought about the desired upsurge. An older generation of Marxists (led by the unvanquished E.P. Thompson) have counter-attacked with the ‘poverty of theory’ and continued to assert the validity of a traditional British socialist heritage going back at least to the 17th century. All this is given full play in Caute’s narrative. Richard Stern is a young ...”

“... often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ‘Studies in ...”

“... KENNEDY: Then you let them build the missiles? MCNAMARA: Then you talk. AMBASSADOR LLEWELLYN THOMPSON: Is this on the assumption that he would run the blockade? MCNAMARA: No, no. They have enough inside that they can continue the construction. ROBERT KENNEDY: We tell them they can build as many missiles as they want? MCNAMARA: Oh, no. What we say ...”

“... John Lilburne ‘long-winded and conceited’; Rainborowe ‘truculent’ and ‘sour’; William Thompson, who fought to a heroic death in the 1649 Leveller mutiny, ‘at bottom was one of those figures who is familiar in all revolutions; the man of violent or criminal propensities who for a time camouflages his lawlessness beneath the rhetoric of resistance ...”

“... come to assume that the thorn in the flesh of the Nato culture was one of their own, but when E.P. Thompson attempted to presume O’Brien onto his side in the matter of CND there was a predictable and pyrotechnic response, with great carnage in the Thompson ranks. O’Brien is not a man to accept that presumptive arm around ...”

“... In the 1940s Labour was soundly élitist. The analysis can be extended to external affairs. E.P. Thompson and others have explained that in the 1890s the British working classes became deeply implicated in imperialism. Indeed, one need look no further than Bevin, or (if he counts as working-class) Morrison, for confirmation. Bevin grew very attached to the ...”

“... gnostic and Behmenist), but it may also (less esoterically) find authority in St Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians. These passages, which originated in Paul’s polemics against the slavish observance of Jewish ceremonial and ritual regulations, might be taken to have a much wider ...”

“... or it can make pseudo-epic. Does J.G. Farrell take the Celtic line in The Siege of Krishnapur, and Paul Scott follow a more plodding and literal Anglo-Saxon formula in the four-novel sequence of The Raj Quartet?There might be something in that. I suspect, for one thing, that those who cannot read Tolkien find Paul Scott ...”

“... shared in government, whether by royal appointment or congenital right. According to I.A.A. Thompson, the favourite, or valido as he was known in Spain, on which Thompson is an authority, emerged ‘at a particular moment in the development of the central administration’. He represented ‘a window of transition ...”

“... I don’t think they flow from his religious commitment. In giving his own interpretation of John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Faith and Reason’, MacIntyre says: It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to ...”

“... his paedophilic housemaster. If Williams’s notion does not take sufficient account of the Paul Foots of this world, it also fails to take account of the army of ex-working-class socialists who are not averse to swapping their political beliefs for a Jacobean farmhouse in Kent. Orwell did not get a bullet through his throat in Spain because he was ...”

“... not feel themselves to possess such agency. ‘We all imagine we can mould our own lives,’ Edith Thompson wrote from Holloway, where she was executed in January 1923, having been found guilty of inciting the murder of her husband by her lover. ‘We seldom can, they are moulded for us – just by the laws and rules and conventions of this world.’ ...”

“... North-East Canada and his alternation between dependence on home and an urge to hive off. Having Paul Gallico’s Snow Goose read to him at prep school, rediscovering the novella in a hotel when he was convalescing from a major operation in his mid-twenties: these experiences inspired him to follow the snow geese as they made their flight north-eastwards in ...”