“... Jane Austen is conservative or radical, significant as she represents her period or not. It may be that the great new fashion in Jane Austen is a protest by ordinary readers, buying her fiction in staggering numbers, that the writer is not like that: she is only definable as a presence supremely capable of giving large pleasure. Unsurprisingly, the boom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... philosopher, and historian of philosophy, of the despised old school. It is clear now, as it may not have been then, that Copleston roundly refutes Ayer’s position, doing so with courtesy, clarity and intellectual discipline. At times Ayer flails wildly, as his astute tormentor drives him from one uninhabitable corner to another – though it is not ...”

“... array of Russian thinkers such as Leo Shestov, who emphatically rejected the logic of identity: A may be equal to A, but then again it may not. There is some overlap between Shestov and a thinker who is now better-known, Mikhail Bakhtin; both celebrate forms of discourse that dispense with a fixed subject position and set ...”

“... and that verdict, based as it is on scrupulous argument and an impressive mastery of the subject, may be difficult to upset. Aside from Berlin, the only thinkers to survive Gray’s bombardment without a scratch are Michael Oakeshott and Karl Popper. Gray even pays Oakeshott the compliment of quoting him twice: ‘In political activity, then, men sail a ...”

“... as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may well want to know how much of the book really represents Labour policy. The State We’re In will almost certainly be a powerfully influential book among Labour’s élite, but many of its positions – particularly its out-and-out republicanism – are ...”

“... in Time. As it is, with Mrs Thatcher set to complete at least 13 years in office, Iris Murdoch may now be thought to look a little out of touch with the times, addressing herself to a danger – the destructive beauty of the fanatic left-wing soul – that we have, for the time being at least, left behind. Meanwhile McEwan, setting his novel several years ...”

“... the charismatic, controversial Soviet leader, castigated for remaining silent from 26 April to 14 May, who nevertheless seized on the Chernobyl accident to add powerful impetus to his campaign of glasnost. You have the Soviet media people, initially so anodyne with their broadcasts of May Day parades, who nevertheless ...”

“... was never off the agenda. One can go further, however. Historical awareness of the Revolution may not run deep among the mass of Frenchmen, but it often does among the élite, for whom it constitutes an elaborate dramatic metaphor shadowing the practices and institutions of contemporary life. Thus at the height of the ...”

“... The Thirty-Nine Steps, and as radio listeners they would have tuned into In Town Tonight. It may be so, but then again it may not. The Oxford don may have been delayed at High Table, and the typist may have gone to her trade-union branch. What ...”

“... important aspects of economic policy, but also from the acceptance by the rest of us of what they may legitimately do in the exercise of this control. Until recently, our acceptance of the notion that central bankers should be committed to price stability has been entirely uncritical; and price stability (not low, but zero inflation) is what the European ...”

“... challenged by Calabresi’s lawyer (on dubious grounds of prejudice) and never concluded. On 17 May 1972, Calabresi was assassinated on his doorstep. No one claimed responsibility. Lotta Continua declared that political murder was not an instrument of social liberation, but that it was unable to condemn an act in which the exploited classes recognised ...”

“... the breast, some ways of viewing it which Yalom condemns, are so well illustrated that the reader may also share them before condemning them. It is part of the interesting problem Yalom has set herself that we – the male or female ‘we’ – cannot, should not, be disgusted by almost any graphic representation of the woman’s breast, even while we are ...”

“... so the planets revolving around Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Aldebaran, Betelgeux and all the rest, may be composed of the same minerals as their suns. May not the presence of iron indicate probable industries of every variety? And would not sodium tell of seas, and hence of rivers, with all their accompanying ...”

“... a way through the early shoals of modernisation without entirely losing their Chineseness, and may therefore help us to predict China’s outcome. Schell treats the preoccupations of China’s intellectuals as the central reality. Philip Snow defines his China in terms of a contrast, between what Kang Yuwei, the late 19th-century reformer, used to call the ...”