“... 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 ...”

“... screens for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) will not find it in OAD. People in this country who may be aware that American motor-car terminology, say, is different from their own will have no way of knowing where in OAD the equivalent motoring terms are to be found. Americans will not be able to use OAD to decode from British, nor will people in Britain be ...”

“... specialism was crystallography, the bearing of which upon the injustices of capitalist society may not be immediately apparent to the layman: but to Bernal that was immaterial. It was the essentially rational nature of all scientific thinking which in his view demonstrated the potential value of a scientific approach to any human problem; and at the age of ...”

“... restore its ‘consensual’ cohesion and thus ensure deliverance? Rationally to do so, they may expect to have answers to two questions. The first is who the élite actually are. To his credit, Higley has tried to find out, at least in Australia, where he works. Also to his credit, he doubts whether he has entirely succeeded. He decided that élites ...”

“... it all, as Maud appears to have done, is surely going a bit far, however widely acceptable it may make one. The sense that there was never anything actually wrong about Maud’s reactions, in the situations in which he found himself, is profoundly disquieting. Did he not sometimes think an unsuitable thought? Not even when George Tomlinson was, as he ...”

“... the world around her. But these complexities are, according to Polly Toynbee, worth it. And one may well wonder why, especially since she herself repeatedly points out that biological parents can rarely bring themselves to say a good word about adoptive parents, whom they regard as ‘predators’ and ‘interlopers’, while adoptive parents have a natural ...”

“... of that fatal convenience-word ‘reify’ (ask the kulaks who reifies more than the Marxists do) may leave her temporarily stranded in the land of jargon and dogma, but at the next moment she is back in the true world of art, and expounding with wonderful vigour and insight the symbolism of the slipped chiton, the sieve of Tuccia, or the patrilineal goddess ...”