“... your zone’ event to boost attendance figures; although, despite appearances, the body zone may be less susceptible to anthropomorphism than a crumbly old codex. To adopt a book, call the British Library Development Office on 020 7412 7047, fax 020 7412 7168, e-mail adopt-a-book@bl.uk or visit their website at ...”

“... that it forces us to look at the celebrated through the eyes of the not-so-celebrated. The books may be written about ‘Iris’, but they are always also about ‘John’, who fell in love, fifty years ago, with a girl he saw riding by on a bicycle, and about whom he fantasised, before he even met her, that ‘nothing had ever happened to her: that she was ...”

“... there has been a considerable volume of litigation in relation to closed material. Be that as it may, the Strasbourg court’s comment provided the inspiration for legislation in this country, and, in 1997 the Special Immigration Appeals Commission or SIAC was created to hear appeals in immigration or deportation cases where evidence is involved whose ...”

“... don’t add up to an explanation of how imitation came to be understood negatively, there may be no explanation to find. Semantic shifts can be as difficult to retrodict as to interpret. But whatever the causes, over the past two centuries or so ‘imitation’ has become mainly pejorative in common usage and marginal in literary criticism. Writers ...”

“... travelled out of their country in order to be able to speak of it in safety. There are those who may find this assessment too pessimistic. But the country faces formidable problems – fundamentalism, the family succession, regional tensions, the economy, together with a generalised disenchantment and wish for reform. Since Saudi Arabia is essentially a ...”

“... the incongruity, since the form of the word suggests a diminutive (which according to the OED it may etymologically have been). The comedy of bigness and littleness explodes into the baroque extravaganza of the final tableau, with the monarch’s immolation on a blazing pyre of compulsive and polymorphous copulation: Here, glowing C– –t, with flaming ...”

“... Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on closing the book, ask himself what is the good of it all from a practical point of view, he cannot but admire the extraordinary patience and erudition of Dr Goebel in having gathered together such a mass of interesting historical material.’ But ...”

“... foreign immigrants recently started drying up too, and those megapolises are now shrinking. London may be about to go the same way.I first arrived in St Albans one fine afternoon in late September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a ...”

“... respected judge in this way. But is it wise to tie up senior judicial figures in inquiries that may take years to conclude and which are not guaranteed to produce any government response (or which produce only a partial government response) even when their reports emerge? Is it not the job of the Civil Service rather than the judiciary to produce policy ...”

“... looking for something interesting to investigate, though that is not wholly irrelevant. It may be true that too much has been written and published about him, but it is also true that there is a lot to write about. At the same time, however, the poet’s life, and especially the first half of it, has been examined with a persistence that is beginning ...”

“... But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten ...”

“... ingenuity my mother has no need to understand. Eerie Bittern The eerie bittern – this may sound unfair – spends her days pretending to be reeds and people think she’s sulking, but she’s not, she’s like my mother: sunlight gives her ...”

“... self-humiliation; how it can pleasurably generate the very guilt it seeks to assuage; how it may be a way of provoking as well as avoiding punishment, or of vaunting the self in the act of abnegating it. There is also, if one recalls the young woman at Mass, confession as come-on. All this is alarming stuff for a society which believes that what you see ...”

“... become the target of unreasonable blame. The second, sometimes contingently related dream is what may be called the fantasy of the middle ground. This depends, logically as well as practically, on the model of a spectrum. The spatial metaphor exerts its own semantic pull, and so those placed at either extreme of the spectrum must be described as ...”

“... of his having ‘arrived’. In daydream moments in between the usual author agonising, Podhoretz may have anticipated the publication of Making It as a climactic solo bringing down the curtain on act one of his career and a springboard for his next move. The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the ...”