“... of course: but what of their human and moral nature, their style of writing and speaking? It may be worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers. Jennie Lee’s new book, My Life with Nye, is a valuable personal ...”

“... fails to explain the great majority of myths. In America, a person ignorant of Greek or Latin may get himself paid for teaching the ancient classics by acquiring a smattering of Freud, taking care not to dilute it by an acquaintance with the writings of more recent psychologists. Even some learned and intelligent writers who have devoted themselves to the ...”

“... on the earnings of their ‘prostitution’ – and on those two counts, the jury convicted. It may be debatable whether such things ought to be criminal offences; if so, how they should be defined; and what should be the burden of proof. But that was how the law stood then, and on this occasion at least it was the prosecution, and not the law, that made an ...”

“... experiment’ as a turning point for Britain, inasmuch as hostility to that experiment may be so strong as to preclude the establishment of a new consensus. In its concluding chapters the book appears to turn into a textbook on the British constitution, written for the particular benefit of American students, who find it difficult to imagine our ...”

“... was by a smart answer on those lines that Wilde wrong-footed himself in the witness-box – which may be why, when some tennis mothers were reported this year to be mounting indignant guard to protect their teen-aged daughters from homosexual seduction in the locker-rooms, none of the grandes dames of the circuit uttered an assurance that in most cases there ...”

“... of the old remain in our new ways of thinking. The 18th century still lives secretly within us and may – alas – return.’This metaphor may have sounded more mild and innocent in 1938 than it does now. And in a later text, Rational Materialism (1953), the Gothic shades and magical thinking have turned into ...”

“... than other kinds of war: fear is more intimate and eats into the family and the imagination. One may question with T.S. Eliot whether a civil war ever does end. It may pervade the metabolism of subsequent generations and appear in new psychological and historical traumas, being fed by the memories and passions it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... As an ultimate philosophical proposition, the case for voluntary euthanasia is strong. Whatever may be said for and against suicide generally, the appeal of death is immeasurably greater when it is sought not for a poor reason or just any reason, but for good cause so to speak; when it is invoked not on behalf of a socially useful person, but on behalf ...”

“... what Madame du Deffand was not. She was not, whatever the publisher of Benedetta Craveri’s book may claim, a woman who ‘approached love and sex with a frankness centuries ahead of her time’: her time was the 18th-century Regency, which took a casual view of fidelity, and the hedonistic age of Louis XV. She died in the reign of Louis XVI, a couple of ...”

“... the dawning of a new age of peace and prosperity. By the time of the Cairo Agreement on 4 May, Rabin’s victory was complete. On 12 May Meron Benvenisti said of the Cairo Agreement in Haaretz: ‘A perusal of hundreds of the Agreement’s pages can leave no doubt about who is the winner and the loser in this ...”

“... and self-evidently central to Chardin’s painting, has altered.’ Indeed it has, and there may be ample reason to worry about what cyber-space and virtual reality are going to do to the so-called Gutenberg galaxy. But though one may share his nostalgia for the book, his love for the illuminating detail of ...”

“... Modernism’s scene of emergence and triumph in America, “Frost” and “Pound” may turn out to be not so much names of authors who quarrelled over basic issues as they are signs of cultural forces in struggle, whose difference presented itself to Frost in 1913 as a choice between mass circulation and avant-garde little ...”