“... future betrayal softens his fury at die Boere. When he gets to Pretoria he can hardly bear it: May this earth be blighted! May locusts devour their jacaranda trees! May Loftus Versfeld Stadium be used for political rallies by the ANC! May the State ...”

“... be read in tandem with a lecture series spread over a university term or semester. Yet while there may have been perfectly good pragmatic (as well as commercial) motives for writing a new book on 19th-century art, the main reason put forward by Eisenman et al is the need for a critical (as opposed to empiricist/affirmative) survey of the period. That salient ...”

“... Say ‘Iain Banks’ and the person you are talking to will say ‘The Wasp Factory.’ Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty ...”

“... novels have been preoccupied with women who feel themselves to be profoundly separate. This may be the result of either choice or necessity, or of stoically making a choice of necessity. They are often tempted to alleviate this solitariness by falling in love with a man or attaching themselves to a couple or a family, but this usually ends in recoil and ...”

“... through an indefinite number of generations by what is really a form of artificial selection. This may sound an unpromising basis for exploring Darwinian evolution. However, partly because they mimic both the genetic and the developmental characteristics of organisms, biomorphs turn out to be spectacularly successful evolutionary material. Quite rapidly, the ...”

“... it can achieve some of its major economic objectives in the process. But the long-term outcome may very well be something that the Government does not anticipate, though I suspect it would not be unduly concerned if it did: a collapse in the maintenance of consent among the governed. If you start from the relatively uncontentious proposition that a ...”

“... Throw-away right at the heart of the Holy Grail theme in Ulysses. Yeats, on the other hand, may have been closer in spirit to a friend of mine who, in a poem about the Grand National which Foinavon won at 100/1, had the bookmakers going home in tears at such a big-priced winner, not realising that horses only run at big prices because no one backed ...”

“... more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues ...”

“... You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing, undeniable, incommunicable experience we’ve all had. And yet for all its ubiquity, pain is a solitary encounter, a lonely way of discovering the certainty that you exist ...”

“... prolong our stay on the planet through physical survival and reproduction (and their refinements) may be the main priority, but recording our time here is pretty much what we do with our considerable spare brain capacity. Well, we have to do something with it, and it passes the time that would have passed anyway, but there are those, like Beckett and, it ...”

“... Discussing several different ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes: ‘one may, finally, see this phase of history in a European light’ – by implication, all other lights are somehow un-European – ‘and observe how many objective factors have combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united ...”

“... Someone has it in for Timothy Madden. Warned by a cop that the cops may be about to take an interest in his stashed cache of marijuana, Madden goes to exhume it. He finds instead a head. Blond, it doesn’t bear gazing upon, but it does have some resemblance both to Madden’s wife Patty, who recently upped and left him, and to Jessica Pond, a new consolatory excitement of his ...”

“... as subjects for tutorial discussion. Texts no longer have to be books: indeed, ‘it may be more democratic to study Coronation Street than Middlemarch.’ That verb ‘may’ is a quaint survivor from the world of tentative liberal open-mindedness, rather like the ghost of John Bayley infiltrating a branch of ...”

“... it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no ...”

“... the method. Sumner’s account of moral standing is that moral patients must be sentient and may, but need not, also be rational. Some moral patients may not be moral agents. Sentience, on Sumner’s reading of the neuro-physiological evidence, emerges in the second trimester of pregancy. First-trimester abortions harm ...”