“... the back or the lid of a small panel painting – would merit this sort of exegesis, but here they may not. Lightbown is as keen to expand on the historical events, recorded in published and in manuscript sources, which provided the occasion for Mantegna’s paintings as he is to investigate the objects depicted in them, and this, also, is often of great ...”

“... attempt to conquer the world, using ‘crowd-psychology’. Thirdly, it is uncompleted, though it may not seem incomplete. Broch worked on it for almost twenty years, while completing other work. More than one version of The Spell has been published. One of them is called The Tempter. The tale is told by a country doctor in the Austrian Alps: his practice ...”

“... official line in Havana is that when the incumbent’s current five-year term is up, in 1998, he may pass his official duties on to younger successors. He would then have ruled Cuba for forty years, retiring at the age of 71. (Joaquín Balaguer, in the adjoining Dominican Republic, though blind, was last year re-elected President for the sixth time, at the ...”

“... particular set of social ordinances sometimes comfortable and sometimes uncomfortable to obey. It may be that what the editors find non-feminine is simply the belief, which Barbauld inspired in others and seems to have shared herself, that she possessed a humane intelligence greater than could be easily accommodated to the requirements of her fate. Men who ...”

“... wanted the colony to become one of flesh-and-blood people rather than simulations. It may well be, however, that humans will take no part in the colonisation, not even in simulated form. By around the year 2030, Tipler estimates, computers will have intelligences equal to ours. Soon afterwards they will overtake us. They themselves could be the ...”

“... spending, or rather, not taxing and not spending). Wright’s message is a very simple one. This may be the fifth consecutive general election for ‘the New Conservatism of a Thatcherised party’, but ‘it is the first election in which New Labour is the alternative.’ This remaking of the party system is clearly the result of two strong personal ...”

“... is, what political responsibility means?’ I said: ‘For all we know, Somalia’s warring clans may be fewer in number than its peace-loving nationals, many of whom pursue sedentary vocations. It is those of us of the nomadic stock who are more vocal, and who claim to be the prototype Somali. To my mind, we’re bellicose beasts, forever at each other’s ...”

“... that Freud’s rooting of adult proclivities of various kinds in the vicissitudes of infancy may also be just ‘good similes’. What in Freud’s etiological speculations might have moved Wittgenstein to this view? He may have felt it was justified because when Freud invoked certain infantile activities as ...”

“... has done the flesh and someone else the fruit, the different ways of showing bloom and shine may not go together – an over-finished bunch of grapes can have too much of the jam label about it Generally, however, the work of others can be seamlessly incorporated. Before himself going abroad, Van Dyck had access to the digested versions of what Rubens ...”

“... schemes to govern Iraq’s bedouin tribes, Shiite townsmen, urban Sunnis and mountain Kurds, and may take into account the smaller minorities of Turcomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Yazidis. Garner, who retired from the US Army in 1997 as a three-star general and then worked for L-3 Communications, an armaments company, is the man sent by President Bush to run ...”

“... a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must. There is no one to blame.Except that this is not the way things happen, only the way we have been taught to see them, by epic poets and the news camera. ‘Our grief is not Greek,’ Auden adds, meaning that the story of our time is not helpless ...”

“... mid-forties and below, while in Europe and America it is predicted that within a few decades we may live to a hundred years or more. HIV/Aids spreads unusually slowly for an unchecked epidemic. The graph of an epidemic in the acute stage is like a slanted ‘S’. From a single case, the number of people with the disease accelerates until it reaches a ...”

“... national essence from the one which has penetrated so deep into their modern psyche that it may never be successfully extracted. Maybe the uncomfortable truth will always be resisted. But a nationalism did emerge, thanks mainly to the Reformation. Until then, the Isles remained intimately bonded with the mainland. Davies elaborates for this earlier ...”

“... but the rest of the fat world will have to wait longer for its get-thin pills. The truth is, they may never come, but anyone who starts to read this book could be forgiven for thinking we’re almost there. Shell, who writes, and teaches the writing of, science journalism in the US, has mixed remarkable stories such as that of the Punjabi cousins, with smart ...”

“... I had in the Wimpole Street days of adoration, – & now I begin to wonder naturally whether I may not be some sort of a real angel after all. It is not so bad a thing, be sure, for a woman to be loved by a man of imagination – He loves her through a lustrous atmosphere, which not only keeps back the faults, but produces a continual novelty, through its ...”