“... 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 ...”

“... peculiar and transient difficulties of one offshore island at an awkward corner in its history. It may be time for another spin of the wheel in the 1980s, with the revival of doctrines of sound money and good housekeeping under Reagan and Thatcher. Now Keynes has admittedly not been getting any younger in the meantime, so the hypothetical views upon economic ...”

“... scene. ‘There are hundreds of objects here for which there are no words in Yiddish. They may not even have names in English. All life in America keeps constantly changing. How can such a nation create a real literature?’ Isaac must have agreed at least up to a point with this defeatist view. Although only just 30, he chose to stick to Yiddish as ...”

“... flaws of the individuals in the case. It maintains that since everyone has prejudices, the dangers may be mitigated only by changing the person from time to time’, every few years; he can, but need not, come from inside the BBC or indeed this country. When, prior to Glock’s takeover, the Proms were ruled by a committee, any fairness, balance, was bought at ...”

“... the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account ...”

“... at last, however, the faith which moves mountains has moved even a publisher, and, whatever one may think of the edition, everybody who has any sort of justice and kindness in his heart must rejoice at the courage of the University of Chicago Press, who have taken this half-century’s enterprise under their wing, as well as at the courage of Miss Byrne who ...”

“... Rowan.’ (Rowan was an 18th-century patriot.) With this sentence out guide is in difficulties. We may allow a child and an old lady to give pet-names to two brushes. It is another thing to be told that ‘as he grows older’ he ‘meditates’ on actual historical events. We become sceptical. A novel is not a biography. Dedalus is not Joyce. We ask ourselves ...”

“... is mushy at best, resting, not on respect, but on a caprice that might be withdrawn, and which may even imply the fascist notion that the lives of animals are somehow forfeit to humans but can be redeemed by an act of clemency or leniency on the part of the boss species. His very terminology does violence to the pro-animal arguments of such Victorians as ...”

“... it ‘easier for the dominators and predators who prosper in a Hobbesian or Sadean world’, one may agree that all these things are as bad as he says, while questioning whether they’re any worse than the intellectual atmosphere revealed by his own bludgeoning style and the vulgar facility of his mental transitions. I wonder, too, whether the connection ...”

“... in words as the means, the lovely apparatus, of revelation. One of these, ‘Gooseberry Fool’, may surprise English readers by the fuss the poet kicks up over her discovery of the unexotic fruit, which she ends by promising to incorporate in the dish of the title, but only after having already made a verbal meal of it. Lines like bristling up through ...”