“... 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 ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”

“... invention, elements of an intended meaning, and they come trailing all kinds of associations which may not have much to do with their material locations out there in the world. The ‘brilliant’, the ‘deep blue’ New England air and the irremediable Californian innocence that crop up so frequently in Superior Women really belong to literature or mythology ...”

“... always remains that there is still much that is concealed, secret and mysterious. Dreyfus may not have been guilty of selling military secrets to the Germans, but who then delivered the information, recorded in the celebrated document discovered in 1894? The so-called Stavisky was certainly a crook, and he must have had protectors in high places to ...”

“... the life of its body, lived openly in observable actions and secretly only in neural events that may soon become accessible to observation. When the mind is reduced in this way, it becomes unrecognisable, especially to its owner. Only a resolute refusal to admit anything impalpable could push philosophers to such an extreme, but the refusal would be ...”

“... Millet, points to the kind of truth that the inexactitudes of myth can reveal: ‘One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving ...”

“... success on behalf of the poor – the formalising and regularising of discretionary payments – may have the unintended consequence of making them poorer. If basic payments are index-linked, then, indeed, the discretionary element is better turned into a formal right. However, where basic payments decline in real terms, the capacity for more compensatory ...”