“... Reich’s breezy confidence that where America leads the rest of the world will eventually follow may be – fortunately in some respects – misplaced. ‘Technology is speeding and broadening access to terrific deals,’ Reich believes. Buyers and investors can switch to something better with ever increasing ease. In order to survive in this new era of ...”

“... refer to repeated attempts to fit its imagery to new circumstances. Several imply that, while they may have left the statue in place, the Flavian dynasty made efforts to remove its Neronian associations (perhaps changing Nero’s facial features to be more unambiguously those of the Sun God; although some people, we are told, detected a resemblance to the ...”

“... poem freely. In the end, the translator’s mode matters less than his or her poetic powers, which may manifest themselves in an empathy with Dante’s style and emotions, and in the handling of rhythm, forms of sonority and verbal intensity. As a medieval Catholic writer, Dante was foreign to post-Reformation English taste, not only in England but in the ...”

“... it lopped, but will feel about it as I have seen others feel about having a tomcat neutered. We may trim trees, butcher them even, but we cherish them too. British species, native and exotic, include those appropriate to the scale of narrow streets – rowan, birch, cherry and hawthorn are more recent additions to ours – and a whole range of others, some ...”

“... problems of the townscape. Visually unappealing though many of the changes in the countryside may be, at least they avoid the mediocrity of so much that technology has given to the contemporary city. In the countryside, four features are especially vulnerable to technological change and the profit motive. They are field boundaries (especially the ...”

“... us now, when the axis of global economic power is tilting away from the West. Whatever else it may have been, the Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. If it is true that the Soviet side lost, it is also true that Western civil societies did not win. For the ending of the Cold War at once removed the legitimacy which they acquired from ...”

“... with its gleaming, sterilised surfaces, its mechanical wheelchairs and pain-killing drugs – may successfully serve as the subject-matter for poetry. Sissman’s great strength was his self-mocking sense of humour. The man who could see the cancer within him as a ‘tissue of fabrications’, or a row of surgical instruments as a ‘service for ...”

“... Things do happen, things do get done and said in the stories, even though sometimes people may be talking at cross-purposes at times, or seemingly to no good purpose. KB: I’m interested in those stories which appear in different forms in different collections. Are they different versions of one story or different stories? RC: I feel they’re ...”

“... polyesters and so forth: even so, and although quite a quantity of the heavier, tougher fabrics may be allowed to press up close in the wash with one another, be tumbled this way and that and still not lose their purity, it is preferable to wash a white blouse, or white stockings, or a white shirt, quite separately. The ghostly narrator of Fay Weldon’s ...”

“... by a much more conservative figure as Khrushchev was before him, then Western disappointment may well mimic the previous disenchantment with détente. Conversely, if revolt were to break out in one of the countries of Eastern Europe which espouses glasnost too enthusiastically, the pressures on Gorbachev to intervene ...”

“... himself a Military Cross by his bravery. Even before the film was shown on BBC television on 31 May Robert Lawrence had appeared on Wogan and been interviewed on radio, When the fighting is over had been serialised in the Observer, and the Daily Mail had chosen to question some of the assertions made by the Lawrences, père et fils, in their book. There are ...”

“... confusion of university teaching and gunnery instruction. Drilling the principles of Greek grammar may be appropriate to the methods of the army classroom. But to help young people explore for themselves the strange, foreign cultures of Greece and Rome is an activity which ought to bear as little resemblance as possible to explanations of the workings of a ...”

“... in the scene.’ Of Nimoy’s autobiography, though every bit as triumphalist as Nichols’s, one may say that there is a kind of failure built into it, for twenty years ago Nimoy produced a book called I Am Not Spock: now he knows on which side his bread is buttered. As with Nichols, however, the fictional character seems to have swallowed up the real ...”

“... sexual and her emotional life. Biogenetic manipulation opens up much more radical perspectives. It may retroactively change our understanding of ourselves as ‘natural’ beings, in the sense that we will experience our ‘natural’ dispositions as mediated, not as given – as things which can in principle be manipulated and therefore as merely ...”

“... or so a new Armed Forces Act comes before Parliament, the most recent having passed into law in May 2001. These Bills are minutely examined in both the Commons and the Lords: such legislation is invariably scrutinised by a select committee specially appointed for the purpose, and the 39 clauses and seven schedules of the 2001 Bill were also the subject of ...”