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“... irony . . . and from the practically Dickensian humour governing the characterisation in the major novels.’ In the same volume there is a fierce essay by Timothy Buck on the insufficiencies of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by ...”

“... woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of condition and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well, when he suckt another of contrary ...”

“... is almost certainly the right one: a large proportion of the electorate concluded that the major parties had nothing to offer them and stayed away. That might be hard on the Liberal Democrats, but it’s true enough of the other two parties. It is the adoption by the Labour Party of a neo-Thatcherite programme, modified too late for many (and thus the ...”

“... one of the most love-filled conventions in the history of conventions’. Amazingly, most of the major figures in the Republican Party stayed away: all of the previous presidential and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... Pinter’s version of an occasion for whatever other interpretation is on offer, so that John Bayley’s claim that Pinter was ‘crimson with rage’ at a dinner in Oxford can be replaced by the simple truth that Pinter was just having a mild-mannered discussion about Israel. Billington doesn’t ask why ...”

“... actor, or even, god save us, a news announcer, will get far more airtime than the demise of a major scientist or philosopher. In the world of the media, a Jack Benny or an Eamonn Andrews are far bigger men than Sartre. Similarly, the media are a thousand times more interested in Dallas and Dynasty, Coronation Street and Eastenders, than in anything that ...”

“... favour, and to seek advantage at a distance. Well served by his agents, especially the invaluable John Husee whose letters would alone make the collection worth having, Lisle heard everything: his correspondence is stuffed with what must in Henrician terms be called political inside-information. It is not gossip that gets recounted in these mentions of ...”

“... its traditional electorate, a desertion from which the Conservative Party of Mrs Thatcher drew a major benefit. The third is the emergence of an intellectual counter-revolution on the right. The interconnections are numerous. The ideologisation of Labour and its electoral decline are obviously related: a lot of Labour voters are turned off by the shrill ...”

“... Terence Ranger’s major new exploration of Zimbabwean peasant politics spans the ninety years from the early colonial period to the 1980s. While drawing heavily on his own intensive research in the Makoni district of Manicaland – virtually a scholarly fief of his – Ranger constantly illuminates Rhodesia’s tortuous passage to majority rule by comparison with two contrasting ‘models’ of decolonisation: Kenya (conservative) and Mozambique (a luta continua ...”

“... housewife has for long been regarded by her, even if not by the law, as a family resource. It was John Hajnal in the 1960s who first alerted historians to the features of the marriage system prevailing for many centuries in Northern and Western Europe: late marriage and a sizeable proportion of permanent celibacy. The phrase ‘the Hajnal marriage ...”

“... The ‘major reinterpretation’ of City and Crown politics, promised by Professor Ashton in his book on the English Civil Wars, and long awaited, has now been published in a slim volume covering the years from 1603 to the outbreak of the Civil War. Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s ...”

“... to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the Royalists, Muhammad was Cromwell; John Milton and other Parliamentarians responded by equating Charles with the prophet. Those who idolised the king as a martyr had ‘stolen the pattern from Mecha’, Milton wrote. Muhammad had been an all-purpose heresiarch, but now he devolved in the European ...”

“... leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to have been killed by Maoists in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry ...”

“... and sordid crash against the tree would nearly obliterate what had come before. He had been a major cultural figure in China; now his poems were being read as flashbacks from his death. He was born in 1956 in Beijing, the son of a well-known poet and army officer, Gu Gong. At 12, he wrote a two-line poem, ‘One Generation’, which was to become an ...”