“... coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris ...”

“... quotes Mill’s wonderful remark about the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’, and we may well think that they also serve who only sit and sleep. For both Prendergast and Catherine Gallagher, the counterfactual is not any old fantasy but an alarm call for those who have been sleeping too long or too comfortably. There are attractions and risks in ...”

“... open to interpretation by lay people and physically to be handled much like any other book. This may also be true of other Protestant commentators such as Bush. In November there was a photograph of the President casually dragging a Koran across the table with his unclean left hand, while the mullah who presented it struggled to smile. Much of the British ...”

“... junior members of the Bar, ever sycophantic in their quest for advancement. Though the Telegraph may have been seeking to protect the innocence of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... that their spouses will be in the grip of a powerful obsession which they cannot share and which may drive these spouses to their laboratories even on Christmas morning. The passage reminded me of Odile Crick’s complaints about her husband’s prolonged periods of in explicable broodiness. On the question of racism, Medawar reflects on the remarkable ...”

“... file, and some forty thousand of them died. Their sufferings were not mythical: nonetheless, one may question the way their particular sacrifice came to dominate the nation’s collective memory of the war (the memories of France and Germany were quite differently constituted). Still very much an insular nation, Britain could not easily comprehend the extent ...”

“... I haven’t found anybody interesting yet. There are not many young people and the small ‘Robert’ (who calls himself ‘Wob’) doesn’t mind accepting a box of bricks (bought at the barber’s) from me but he doesn’t want me to help to play with ’em. I tried yesterday. ‘Wob’ stood it as long as he could. Then he screwed up his face, and ...”

“... post-war foreign policy ‘establishment’: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy and Averell Harriman. All were men whose influence derived less from their official station than from their social position, their professional and intellectual accomplishments, their personal prestige and their friendship with one ...”

“... perhaps the circumstances in which she wrote it seemed, after the war, too distant; and it may be that it was too closely attached to her private feelings anyway. As many of her critics remark, Barbara Pym’s fiction characteristically takes off from some autobiographical reality: the unexpectedly high incidence of anthropologists, for instance, is to ...”

“... through the pretence of utter indifference to any other possibility. As a gimmick the Modern may fire an arrow backward, but must always shun the convention of consciousness running free in time – being ondulant et divers. This is as true now as it was in the days when the Modern was invented, and practised by novelists like Hemingway or Anthony ...”

“... homo: the concept is rejected both by heterosexuals (unwilling to accept the possibility that they may not be as straight as they think they are) and by homosexuals (outraged by the easy option offered to make them straighter). The very term is semantically ambiguous, vacillating between the original botanical meaning – ‘of two sexes’ or ‘having both ...”

“... it is generated. The Divine Comedy is a great example of this kind of total adequacy, but a haiku may also constitute a satisfactory comeback by the mind to the facts of the matter. As long as the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighing function. It becomes ...”

“... Vehicle One, or the ‘electric turkey’ as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in ...”

“... But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan. We see him sitting by the camera on the set of Rear Window, looking ...”