“... Lhasa has formed in the town around the nucleus of the Dalai Lama: schools teach in Tibetan and English, there are various government ministries, a national library, a troupe which preserves and performs Tibetan dances and songs. Versions of the main Tibetan monasteries have been built where the monks go about their business dressed in an unlikely ...”

“... before the war and advocated a federation of the world’s democracies, attracted the Tory MP Richard Law as well as supporters as diverse and unlikely as Bevin and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek. Another groupuscule, Union and Reconstruction, foresaw a national rebirth which would end unemployment and hunger. This was outlined in the polemic ...”

“... half days – he managed to come third, two places behind Ruqayyah Rida, one of the most talented English girls ever to have played the game. In reality, oceans of ability lay between Charlie and Rida; he was just thrilled to find himself on an adjacent board to her. But he was also developing new levels of patience: one of his games in Nottingham drifted ...”

“... before I bring him into St Mark’s Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English cathedral town.’ ‘Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities’; and, having done so, enter St Mark’s Place, where ...”

“... not rejoice at the vict-ories of the Boers or grieve about their defeats, after all they kill the English soldiers too’. But he couldn’t help it: ‘I am glad when I read about the defeats of the British, it cheers my soul.’ Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons but because they thought the Boers ...”

“... the infallible cure for athlete’s foot: all reproduce when passed from one person to another. Richard Dawkins has called such reproducing ideas ‘memes’. Runciman’s insight has been to see that Darwinian ‘things’ can also be whatever occurs when an individual finds him or herself to be a member of a group. What then occurs are ‘social ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... theory. Given this comparative framework, we can begin to ask new questions about the English reaction to Darwin. Surely the most pressing task is to look at the socialist response at home. We already have pointers. Malcolm Kottler in his essay shows that even Wallace (who studied in Mechanics Institutes and socialist Halls of Science), supposedly ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... historical vision. Like Kafka, whose work she played a major role in having translated into English, she used matter-of-fact prose to dramatise a ‘nightmare world’ in which arbitrary decrees are palmed off as sacred laws. For better or worse, Arendt’s vision long ago lost its shocking novelty. Thanks to the memoirs of survivors like Jean ...”

“... is successfully air-brushed by an elegant Post-Modern presentation. Mitchell, who teaches English and art at Chicago University, and is an editor of Critical Inquiry (the Debrett’s of cultural and critical studies), emerges from this book as a kind of ‘Pomosaurus’ or perhaps even a ‘thesaurus’ (a creature nimble with multiple meanings). The ...”

“... agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from the English word ‘scholarship’) was grounded in philology. Ethnic identity was defined by linguistic identity: a German was the speaker of a Germanic language and German identity thus extended to Spain, North Africa, the Netherlands and Italy – areas that had ...”

“... copy of Chase’s book, the officers of the Essex ‘knew not that for more than twenty years the English … had been resident in Tahiti; & that in the same year of the shipwreck – 1820 – it was entirely safe.’ The two mates argued for a different plan: the three boats would sail south for 1500 miles, until they were out of the trades and into a belt ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... Beckett’s first French novel. The cognates Muldoon finds for Beckett’s name are Old Irish and English, becc and boc, which sound like characters from one of the late plays. He neglects Beckett’s French Huguenot background, which the author himself used as a source of onomastics in the matter of his name. At one point in Eleutheria a disgusted spectator ...”