“... beefy constable administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Anywhere but here lies in its presentation of Adele, the heroine’s mother. Every American woman may have her own story, but all children who read can use the myth of a mother both vital and wrong. As with her use of the movement to the West, one feels that Mona Simpson’s drawing of Adele, her giving her lines like ‘I’m part of all that went before and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... appropriately poignant quotes from the Iliad. Or so the story goes. Whatever Nero’s popularity may have been among the grass-roots (enough, certainly, to encourage a series of ‘false Neros’ to attempt to reclaim his position in the years that followed), he had sufficiently outraged elite opinion that by 68 almost every Army commander and provincial ...”

“... have met a porcupine in a book and liked the word. Like Rowe, too, Greenblatt thinks Shakespeare may have stolen deer, but for him this was ‘a skilful assault upon property, a symbolic violation of the social order, a coded challenge to authority’, since Greenblatt likes appositional clauses as much as he likes to think that Will was a bit of a boy ...”

“... to relive an episode from your past rather than inertly recollecting it, because in repetition you may be spared the melancholy inherent in recollection. Repetition, for Robbe-Grillet, is more humdrum: it means reliving the act of writing a novel and reintegrating along the way small situations and favoured motifs from the books that made his name in the 1950s ...”

“... 1911. Guilty by association with the Holocaust, he poses a special challenge to biographers. They may choose to concentrate on his many contributions to non-eugenic fields as diverse as psychology and meteorology, or to explore the roles he played in the upper echelons of Victorian science, but there’s no escaping the spectre of the Final Solution. Any ...”

“... profile and monkish tonsure on display. Toulouse-Lautrec and van Dongen followed suit. Fénéon may not have liked it, but it was the more interesting view. In full face he looks as if he might be someone else: in old age he resembled Gide. Whereas the profile shot offered artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and, beneath ...”