“... 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 ...”

“... speculations. A contemporary explained: ‘In engraving and its operation the process of thought may be carried on with that of the work, and neither be retarded in its progress, by one who is master of his subject in either way. Hence the wild and fanciful theories that emanate from a well stored and imaginative mind.’ Because Blake made his living ...”

“... the amount of attention that has been lavished on the Napoleonic period in its many aspects, it may seem strange that a full life of Field-Marshal Prince Barclay de Tolly has not appeared before now: but it is not difficult to suggest reasons for this. Barclay had a rather dour and in some ways unattractive personality. He had little of the panache of his ...”

“... such grounding, no such principle of invisibility, can be found in Dickens. I am assuming that it may be all right to talk of classes with reference to the work of writers who did not themselves do so. Backward-ranging comparisons, and a risk of anachronism, are likely to enter into an experience of Peter Taylor’s fine stories, for his is an art which makes ...”

“... The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a curious desperation to deny it? No doubt, they sense that to look at Japanese culture too closely would threaten a long-cherished complacency about their own ...”

“... acknowledgement that Dublin has no executive power, and at the same time some apprehension that it may have assumed some measure of political responsibility, in a situation which could explode at any moment. The Unionists are patently clearing the decks for action, but for precisely what kind of action is unclear, perhaps even to themselves. In essence, what ...”

“... in books about composers – for human interest is easily assimilated by the non-musician. It may be considered more useful than German (and hence American) scholarship, but it can hardly be denied that it does not make for good historical writing. The Cambridge Music Guide is an obvious offshoot of the English school, and a rather old-fashioned example ...”

“... friend and Nevill Mott was another near-contemporary. Now that they are both about eighty, they may feel able to risk his posthumous scorn. Mott is a sort of father-in-science to me, and Peierls an uncle. Yet it never occurred to me, until I read these memoirs, how very alike their careers have been. They both grew up into theoretical physics just after the ...”

“... a yawn by the relatively small number of people who are looking for poetry, whatever comfort they may give to those who favour such roundabout methods of promoting a cause, good, bad or, like most causes, merely muddled. Amichai is a complicated character in whose make-up indignation, sometimes violent, is certainly a constituent, but only one of many, which ...”

“... to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear. Found in the Street is her exact territory; she patrols these Greenwich Village streets as if from a ...”