“... 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 ...”

“... the fragility of its confidence, however. Mrs Thatcher had shot its fox, improbable fox though it may be. Neil Kinnock was harshly reminded that every government has formidable cards to play in the run-up to a general election. On the eve of Blackpool, an NOP survey for the Independent and BBC 2’s Newsnight showed that, despite the downturn in the ...”

“... and had reverberations on the Continent because of hostility there towards the Jesuits. Zagorin may go too far in attributing dissimulation to some of the occultists, libertines and unbelievers whom he sees hiding behind esotericism (Sir Walter Raleigh is a case in point), but his central thesis of the pervasiveness of dissimulation in 16th and 17th-century ...”

“... father’s own failure to win a Cambridge fellowship in 1877 – Jane Emery suggests that Macaulay may have been anxious not to outstrip her beloved father academically. There is certainly an air of defeatism in Macaulay’s person as well as in her work, about which she was consistently self-deprecating: ‘I have no wish to be a great writer. My touch is for ...”

“... For one of the problems Pinckney’s narrator has to face up to is that, no matter how scornful he may be about his relations and acquaintances with their high-falutin ideas about being Also Chosen, he himself is no sort of hero by any reckoning. All he has to offer in place of Negro Firstism is his own jejune belief in the solitary artist, the lonely black ...”

“... his destiny. Brookner takes the dire risk that her heroine’s literary debacle or misdemeanour may spread back into the whole image of the novel and spoil it in retrospect for the reader. That this does not happen shows what a humorous and humane as well as accomplished artist she is. She abounds in consciousness to a point that would satisfy even a Henry ...”

“... The practice of ‘blacking up’, which has died out in the surviving forms of the morris dance, may in fact have had its roots in the pagan ritual of smearing ash on the face, and the elements of battle mime may have originated in vegetation symbolism based on the battle of the seasons. But it is clear that by the 16th ...”

“... that present moment.He’s still alive as he turnsjust a second before the shooting;and so I may tell you his story,not tapping into memory but into time,and refire the first salvo for the endof white hegemony in Central Africa.You must come along. Whether you’re aCaribbean in Brixton able to instruct me,or white middle class in Surrey,or an elderly ...”

“... that can occur in coupling, and how the mind registers the light and shade of intimacy, but we may laugh when we come across this: So she loved my butt – and the nape of my neck ... And my lips somewhat, the not-hurtful things. I’m big enough phallically that some people do what she did and widen helplessly. Maybe that is really common. Really, she ...”

“... of confrontation which he has used against the British printing unions in the Wapping dispute may hark back to his 19th-century predecessor as proprietor of the Times, but they were perfected in the US management-union wars of the 1970s, which were quite unarguably won by the managements. Equally clearly, the British unions had not learnt the lessons. All ...”

“... would have hit any more.’ Healey and Gilmour – and indeed Edward Heath and James Callaghan – may be thought to have spoken for those two-thirds of poll respondents who decided that Mrs Thatcher had been guilty of a brutal misjudgment: and for the many people who believe that she overrode a rational understanding on the use of counter-terror, together ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his chief concern is to explain the conduct, or misconduct, of the war to his father. It may be that the Guards had better opportunities of knowing what was afoot through being stationed near headquarters, but how an ensign barely of age contrives to get hold of so much information about the dispositions, strengths, handicaps and intentions of the ...”

“... us giants,’ wrote Jacques de Vitry, a l3th-century bishop whose years in the Middle East may have encouraged him to be less ethnocentric than the majority of his contemporaries. A more general issue raised by Friedman’s book is that of the nature and functions of the stereotype, and in particular the stereotype of the alien, the ‘other’. As he ...”