“... there yet.” And so ...’ This was Petrov telling a story as we sat around a bivouac fire in May 1970, somewhere in the flat lands east of Muié (which is south of Luso, which is ‘some place down there’), so as to explain the wrongful reputation given to his people, the Angolans, by their neighbours in Southern Africa. Although his own language is ...”

“... into a belligerent party and made their humanitarian function yet more difficult. Old UN hands may recall the Congo, but at least some Americans must be remembering their experience in the Lebanon in 1983, when, having become equally involved in the local disputes and suffering heavy losses in consequence, they had to stage a humiliating withdrawal. The ...”

“... of America, a refracted image in the American looking-glass.’ Racialist fictions at this level may be readily identifiable. But Gates, not above a certain archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to ...”

“... many questions for its own good. How does it feel to feel that you are – and then again that you may not be – except that you know you must be – you are – it is expected of you – a Messiah? How does it feel to have a Messiah in the family – as your son – when you devoutly wish to have your Messiah somewhere else, preferably in the next world? How ...”

“... For as the OED informs us, the crowd is only a throng or dense multitude, while the mob may mean the lower orders, rabble, tumultuous crowd or a promiscuous assemblage of persons. In fact, the connotations of ‘crowd’ are more mobile and more complex than they may look at first glance. According to ...”

“... And also that the creative artist was in some sense a problem, at least for psychoanalysis. Art may not be soluble in terms of psychoanalysis – it is difficult to see now why anyone should want it to be – but it is interesting to see what kind of object it is for different psychoanalysts, both how they find themselves using it in their writing and what ...”

“... the kind of man his modern admirers would welcome to the Senior Common Room. This last conclusion may well be true. Yet I do not think that many of the others survive re-exposure to the texts. Bunyan’s Relation of his Imprisonment is terribly revealing. Judge Kelyng was no doubt a bully and Clerk Cobb a time-server, but between them they seem to have done ...”

“... won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, to see whether a shanty town of that name really exists. The novel may be a lush documentary or it may be a historical romance: we can’t be sure. In any case, it is likely to change the way we think about the lives and circumstances of millions of people living on the periphery of large ...”

“... English-speaking world Kubla and Xanadu will stand for ever as symbols of Oriental splendour. It may be that Khubilai and the last emperor are more accessible to us than most of their kind since both were themselves non-Chinese, and both formed friendships with Westerners, so that descriptions of their personalities through European eyes survive. But Marco ...”

“... not diminish after a hundred encounters. It is the sort of piece which establishes that, while it may be open to question whether Picasso is this century’s greatest painter, he is undoubtedly its greatest sculptor. The late style surely emerges in October 1964 with works such as the two large paintings of The Artist and his Model dated 25 October and 26 ...”

“... point out that the Greek word philosophia does not imply actual possession of great truths, which may be beyond us anyway, but only an uneasy longing for them, such as stirs occasionally in us all. But whether or not philosophy was a universal aspiration, Diogenes recognised only one genuine philosophical tradition. ‘It was from the Greeks that philosophy ...”

“... lives to be lived and the recording process is altogether more routine. For the studio staff it may be a play for today, but tomorrow it’s The South Bank Show and the day after Game for a Laugh. It’s work in a way that filming on location, however arduous, never quite is. Not that it is often arduous. To an onlooker, which for much of the time I ...”

“... any great comic debacle. One therefore turns to Jacobson’s second novel in the hope that he may have learnt something about construction. Jacobson likes salacious titles – though Coming from Behind scarcely lives up to its sexual promise – and Peeping Tom suggests something in the same mode as the first book. So do the early chapters, for Barney ...”

“... What, we may ask, is greatness anyway? Who in the West this century has shown it? Does it only flourish when nurtured by the ecstatic opiates of war? Greatness, in this context, is what people recognise as greatness: manifest success on a national rather than a purely partisan scale. Losing both wars hasn’t helped Germany’s candidates: Clemenceau eclipses both Hindenburg and Ludendorff ...”

“... A schlemiel (so Isaac Bashevis Singer once told me) is really the funniest kind of Jewish fool and may be easily distinguished from the mere schlepper or the schlimazel or the wretched schmuck. Less clever Jews and gentiles must rely on the Oxford English Dictionary which thoughtfully suggests that when the waiter spills soup on the customer the waiter is the ...”