“... editorial note tells us, solved the situation. Betjeman’s heart was thoroughly engaged; he may actually have suffered the sleepless nights he claims to have had. At all events we can be sure he would have lost more sleep over it than he did over the situation in Europe at the time. The same unsmiling fervour characterises a letter to Jack Beddington a ...”

“... since they continue to provide us with so much of our vocabulary. Europa stands for Europe, we may wish to say, just as Narcissus is the original narcissist and Harmony is harmony. The divine rapes (and much else) in Greek myth have been interpreted as figuring military invasions. At a more general level, they can be seen as a projection of the supposed ...”

“... heating; it survived all that the Beatles could do to it in the ‘Peacock Revolution’; and it may yet survive the attempts of the master tailors to price themselves out of existence. Chenoune finds himself repeatedly paying tribute to the English influence on men’s fashion. Successive waves of Anglomania swept France even during the Revolutionary ...”

“... among many rights which were old, one which was new: ‘That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.’ This was the model for the American Bill of Rights of 1791: ‘A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear ...”

“... a possible touch of self-pity. Verdi is at once exciting and safe. One reason why he seems safe may be that, after all, we don’t know him as well as we think. His life coincided with the high point of archive creation – after the establishment of reliable postal services and European peace; before the coming of telephones, small flats, and aeroplane ...”

“... another magus, Robert Graves, the feminine for Redgrove is a source of spiritual energy which men may tap for their own health, and he advocates a form of material mysticism mediated through female bodies. But there’s something rather creepy about his enthusiasm. His version of the Grimms’ Cinderella, Ashiepaddle, shows her as a white witch, who has ...”

“... into stillness again.The doubling of consciousness, in which the figure straying across the field may be no more than a figment of the figure hunched at the table – the mind observing itself, in the third person, in the act of imagining – is present in most of Beckett’s later prose texts. So is the contrast between inner and outer, between the confined ...”

“... is with the working life of shoelaces and the rival hypotheses (there are two contenders) which may be adduced to explain not only how they come to break but also how one shoelace will snap within days of the other. This is the argumentative mainstream, into which, however, flow frequent tributaries in the form of disquisitions on ...”

“... have argued – persuasively, in my view – that the traditional check-list of Defoe’s output may considerably exaggerate the number of items written by him. Backscheider appears unhappy at this revisionist attempt to cut her author down to size. Her prefatory note that ‘my own use of the received canon is conservative’ is itself ambiguous. It appears ...”

“... to interracial accommodation Britain still has to travel. A major theme is racial attacks, which may be seen as the most serious threat to contemporary urban race relations. Not that they are of very recent origin. As Pilkington makes clear, they have been part of the experience of black people in Britain throughout most of the post-war period. Others have ...”

“... with the resulting civilian death toll ‘conservatively estimated’ at 100,000. These figures may have come as an embarrassment to the editors of the Salisbury Review, who in 1987 published an inexcusable defence of Renamo by Jillian Becker. They may even have made the State Department sit up. While it has shrewdly ...”

“... writes, ‘are the same roots as those of the phenomenological school.’ The two traditions ‘may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow to different seas.’ The Rhine is Frege and the Danube Husserl, and the ...”

“... and an index, though a list of illustrations and their sources is lacking. Simplistic as it may seem, we are still tempted to see the story of the Soviet theatre before 1933 in terms of the rival approaches, ambitions and successes of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, the two great innovators of the prerevolutionary Moscow theatre of whom the one was in due ...”

“... in order to take in the food that I see in the centre, and, at an earlier stage, some other sense may have told me which way to go in order to get into the position to eat. Our philosophical tradition is a very theoretical one and it is easy for us to forget how much our own actions contribute to the picture of the world around us. We think of the world as ...”

“... respectively. Pears’s own lecture courses at Oxford and UCLA (from which this book is drawn) may have followed this pattern, but he encourages continuity. He is not one to say, with Mr Bryan Magee in his recent BBC series The Great Philosophers,* that ‘since Wittgenstein repudiated his own early philosophy, and since in any case it is now his later ...”