“... 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can find him juggling with the master’s Renaissance episteme, the cosmos of resemblances and affinities which was to be superseded in the age of Descartes by a new cosmos of identities and hiatuses.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 ...”

“... drugs then on the market. Only a quack could have acted the part allotted to him and, whatever he may have been like before he joined Hitler’s ‘court’, Morell conformed as best he could to what was expected: ‘What more natural,’ Mr Irving asks, ‘than that the busy Führer should engage a physician who would work instant “miracle cures” through ...”

“... many sorts of purported objects that are vague and undefined. The critical, scientific philosopher may be content to leave the common man with his vague and untidy ontology: but for his own purposes, the pursuit of a system of the world which shall be simple, comprehensive and precise, he may revise, curtail or add as he ...”

“... essential staple of the local Indian economy. Indeed, Brody conjectures that this corner of Canada may have been the earliest concentration-point for the proto-Indians who made their way from Asia into the new continent, and that the Beavers may therefore be heirs to the oldest continuous hunting economy in the ...”

“... is an Emile Zola trying to get out. But whatever the Mayor of Nice, Monsieur Jacques Médecin, may say, this is not the case with Greene. Although he has obviously seen himself in the same light as Zola, to judge by the title of his pamphlet and by references that are in the text, he has recounted a fait divers rather than a cause célèbre. There will be ...”

“... even pushing in the bus queues are assembled together in an ominous chain of signification. These may seem to have common causes, common perpetrators, but their real connections remain obscure. This does not prevent them from being lumped in with terrorism and political assassination as the grist for a historical narrative of decline. Some of the more extreme ...”

“... questions Ms Turkle puts to herself. 1968 is the cardinal date in her narrative, and the events of May of that year. That blissful if generally unproductive hiatus in the political life of France has been required to explain rather too much of what has happened in the country since: it is in danger of growing into the creation-myth of present-day France. But ...”