“... 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 ...”

“... I have thought of Belfast as a jail surrounded by drab, cold streets. The fact that my sister May has lived congenially enough in Belfast for many years has not altered my impression of the city. I visited her a few months ago and found it as grim as it was in 1939. But my experience of it, I concede, is limited. I stayed away from Belfast during the ...”

“... well-known on Fifth Avenue, gets in, with the young Cristina Iglesias as token promise. People may barely notice, because for decades the PNV’s nationalism has been rousingly defined by exclusion rather than inclusion: that is, by opposition to the Spanish state, from which it has wrung juridical and fiscal privileges that other autonomous ...”

“... A patent agent who has spent his time among the open shelves in the old Science Reference Library may fetch up beside a scholar who has worked equally long on manuscripts but has never seen as much as a hundred running feet of them shelved together. There will still be a kind of hierarchy – although you can ask for a general book in the Rare Books Reading ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... known physical phenomena in a single overarching explanatory scheme. Physicists, in other words, may be running out of things to discover. Every bit of evidence, then, points to the conclusion that science, long regarded as the highest and most genuine species of human knowledge, one of the glories of humanity, is nearing a sort of culmination. All of which ...”

“... involves imputing a considerable degree of foresight to the cats involved. She thinks the female may cultivate the challenger just in case his challenge is successful, so that he may spare her kittens on the assumption that they might be his. But can we comfortably impute this inference to a cat? The thing that does most ...”

“... it, waiting for Jelal and Rüya to return, and carries on the daily column in Jela’s name. Jelal may have good reasons for lying low. He is an essayist and storyteller rather than a political journalist – which is hardly surprising in a country where, then and now, authors can face imprisonment for exercising their right to political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Minor anachronisms, on the other hand (as Selbourne points out in the case of the word arguni), may indicate the addition of new information reaching Jacob in Italy, to which he returned in 1273 to write up his adventures. In Jacob’s case, one would have to include here, swallowing hard, the startling ‘Manci’, an opprobrious Mongol-period term which ...”

“... on South Island. The stamp bears two strikes of the Picton cancellation of 21 March 1904, which may have served to disguise its rare quality. Where it went then is a mystery. The package and its address have not survived but perhaps it had the distinction of travelling in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine ...”