“... services like cleaning is paying off handsomely. Many a ‘right-thinking’ newspaper columnist may now write comfortably of those low standards to explain why her children are at independent schools and the family buoyant on its BUPA insurance. Those of us who work with teachers and children and go into schools have been astonishingly foolish. We thought ...”

“... a translator working for the Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto. His fluent command of German may have helped him to survive the Nazi occupation. He joined a resistance organisation, escaped from the Ghetto, and spent the last years of the war in hiding with his wife. Their lives were saved first by a Pole who gave them shelter, later by the advancing Red ...”

“... Mandela is, in fact, manufacturing a new myth: that the past no longer matters. But it does. It may be forgiven, but it can’t be forgotten. By legitimating the perpetrators of past apartheid crimes in the interests of future peace, conversion without repentance is condoned. Not without reason does the religious practice of cleansing from past sins insist ...”

“... feel the same way about going to bed with handsome men, although a dishy premature ejaculator may find that women shun him. He certainly has a low opinion of the feminist sexual imagination. He applauds the way women abandoned brassières in the late Sixties, and believes that for some of the women who did so it was ‘part of the realisation that ...”

“... movies as if he were some sort of touchstone.’ In another child of the Sixties, this sentiment may strike a chord. For the rest, it will probably epitomise what they don’t understand, cannot share, and must therefore dismiss as rubbish. The voices in this book would provide some good lines for a fringe theatre show about a bunch of women rapping (as it ...”

“... has framed a guilty man.’ Among the jokes spawned by the trials of O.J. Simpson, that one may tell the most truth. The man in question had been a famous athlete who became – thanks to a delightful, long-running TV commercial – white America’s black teddy bear. How cuddly he was, how handsome and rich. He flashed a smile of infinite ...”

“... of military rebellion. ‘The idea of Lord Edward as an incurable and innocent romantic – which may conceal the belief that because he was an aristocrat it was impossible for him to have been a committed revolutionary – was promulgated and advertised immediately after his death.’ The powerful, extended family of the Kildares, to which he belonged as a ...”

“... it all than her intellectual lover. ‘You learned a lot in living with me,’ she writes on 2 May 1942. ‘You were a thin turnip, and now you are a very intelligent asparagus.’ The statement is illustrated with a sketch of an erect penis. Sixteen years earlier, in July 1926, when they were on their honeymoon, Weill had confided to her: ‘When I feel ...”

“... and at the same time that nothing in it has any significance at all. Every situation or event may have a story in it, but the short story’s best an will also reveal an absence: the absence of its own meaning. The story’s epiphany must also encounter and accept emptiness. To put it like that may sound a bit glib, but ...”

“... Charterhouse of Parma’ appears in a few sentences on the last page of the novel, so he may as well call it that. The Charterhouse of Parma begins with a brilliant and incisive encapsulation of the Napoleonic romance, and its effect on Europe and on society. Any orthodox novel reader, picking up this excellent new translation by Richard ...”

“... up against a long history of titling: a painter’s wish not to fuss, not to distract the viewer, may be strong and benign. Some say they’ll call their works something, anything, just to oblige gallery owners; or to remove the vexation for curators of having more than one Untitled a year; or for those collectors who like a proper title. The overbearing ...”

“... dramatic rather than a functional gesture), write out a ticket in bold, emphatic letters. People may wheedle. They may beg forgiveness, promising never, ever to do it again. But nothing can deter me. I am Patrol Officer Dredd of Mega Car Park One, judge, jury and executioner, coldly dispensing car park justice. Well, not ...”

“... Steven Aronson’s Hype, a guide to the latest techniques of mass manipulation, may have less impact on British readers than it has had on American. The word is a recent coinage, but since the days of Dickens’s American Notes or, even earlier, of Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, we have been accustomed to associate the practice of hype with what many Brits still call the Yank ...”

“... the mark. Even assuming significant population increase, the men of the resourceful earth (as we may call them) see no reason why there should be a diminution in the primary per capita supplies of food. In order to produce the necessary increase in calories for a higher world living standard, there is clearly a need for greater concentration of productive ...”

“... by radical alteration before the final curtain was reached. Three separate versions survive: they may be seen to correspond with adequate fidelity to the three main ‘acts’ in the drama of her life. The name of her play was The Triflers. The first version belongs to the 1890s and was conceived as a vehicle for her favourite performer, Charles Hawtrey. She ...”