“... of His Passion. Yet his insistent denial of pagan or sub-Christian elements within lay religion may sometimes look like special pleading. An old man of Cartmel, told in James I’s reign of Jesus Christ and His saving power, remarked: ‘I think I heard of that man ... once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and ...”

“... If a mother takes female hormones through part of the pregnancy, for example, her boy child may look physically male and have a masculine range of abilities and mental traits, but be attracted to men rather than women. If the female hormone interferes at a different point in pregnancy, the physically male child ...”

“... London. A montage on the dust-cover promotes a man called ‘the Prince of Darkness’: we may wonder if this satanic figure is ‘Mister Big’ – a successor to the famous Kray brothers, a capo of the Mafia, a leader of the Yardies or the fiendish Chinese Tongs. But no: he is a veteran crime reporter, diabolically nicknamed for his habit of wearing ...”

“... indicates that they are losing more heavily than ever before. There is one possible remedy. Labour may be soft on immigration. The electorate may be scared away from its obvious intention, even at this late hour, by the prospect of hordes of foreigners being seduced into the country by Jack Straw. Several ministers, some for ...”

“... caused the current fad; though as it happens there is new research showing that the crucial factor may not be red wine per se but the fact that the French eat a highly varied diet, and routinely consume food from all four main food groups. In other words, the next red-hot piece of dietic advice is likely to be eat lots of everything. Remember where you read it ...”

“... country in ‘a bad light’. The suggestion that if the world does spare a glance at India, it may notice some not very attractive features, is deeply resented. But then the self-esteem of the metropolitan bourgeoisie is a fragile thing. ‘Don’t talk to me about poverty and all that, please,’ the bright young trainee at the Indian Express admonishes ...”

“... which can enlist the sympathy and attention of medical practitioners. A syndrome offers those who may be having a hard time the validation of the victim’s role. Validation seems to be the key here – and it is Showalter’s attack on their system of inner validation which makes chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers so angry with her. If chronic fatigue ...”

“... Lebanese Shi’ite, is currently on trial in Frankfurt. The prospect of an end to the Gulf War may ease Muslim anger but is unlikely to end it. It sometimes seems that militant Islam was spawned by Ayatollah Khomeini, and hence that it is no more than a decade old. But the ‘crisis of Islam’ has much deeper roots, though Khomeini’s Islamic revolution ...”

“... advice to Britain – which explains much of the book’s popularity inside the USA, and which may cause problems to those accustomed to ‘consume’ American supplies of security. It is easy for many Americans to overlook Kennedy’s wise warnings on the dangerous and destabilising effects of too quickly shrugging off external obligations once ...”

“... cars out of those two decades have become emblematic of a lost nerve and ostentatious brio. There may be pretty obvious reasons for this mode. Our bourses and currencies are haunted by intimations of the previous crash and of the turmoil and recession which ensued. Our sense of the inward connections between the two world wars and of the decline of Europe ...”

“... healing to standardised diagnostics, and drug therapeutics, traditional Chinese medicine, it may be argued, gives priority to the unique concatenation of circumstances producing sickness in the individual, and cultivates treatments which are less specifics against disease (the pill for the ill) than a means of fortifying the sick individual’s ...”

“... with the disciplines of the 12-step group, he likes to ‘identify’. His current appearance may be an act of identification with PWAs (his equivalent of the red ribbon), with Bosnian refugees, Sudanese famine victims or Jodie Kidd. My reading of Stipe’s prematurely geriatric persona is less cynical. During its heyday in the Eighties, the group was ...”

“... them, he has pursued a roughly Warburgian path of investigating the 16th-century intellect. That may suggest Foucauldian overtones, and indeed we can find him juggling with the master’s Renaissance episteme, the cosmos of resemblances and affinities which was to be superseded in the age of Descartes by a new cosmos of identities and hiatuses. Grafton is ...”

“... has become the sunny New South Africa, a country against which the rest of the civilised world may once again safely play cricket and where a holiday hardly registers on your credit card. The Anti-Apartheid Organisation has been disbanded. Fergal Keane has packed up his microphone and gone home. In Trafalgar Square, a beaming Nelson Mandela casts a ...”

“... stuff, socialist realism drama. He is nobody’s idea of a leader. However, my guess is that he may come third. The anger of the hard Left at Kinnock’s failure to vote for Tony Benn for the Deputy Leadership, and his part in blocking Ken Livingstone’s claims to Brent East on the NEC, may attract more votes – in all ...”