“... 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 ...”

“... distance of the meat-packing plant in Saskatoon. Unfortunately or fortunately as the case may be, most of her pieces are set in Montreal, which is as foreign to me as Reykjavik or Ulan Bator, Canada being several countries stitched together in the same flag. She begins, however, in a way that is familiar: ‘That year, it began to rain on the 24th of ...”

“... or compiled an anthology on a particular theme ...’: the editor of The Oxford Book of Death may have flinched from an Oxford Book of Irony, but he might have taken as a model Aldous Huxley’s lovely lasting book Texts and Pretexts, with its fine title (modest and radiating) and with its responsible freedoms as to when to quote, and how much, and with ...”

“... soldiers sought as playmates. Hopes were raised by a further relaxation a few weeks later: ‘You may now engage in conversation with adult Germans in the streets and public places. You will not, for the present, enter the homes and houses of the Germans.’ Nigel Hamilton, in this robust last volume of his 2732-page trilogy, does not reproduce these ...”

“... only the delicate appetites of language specialists. However, for what has been set before us may the Lord make us truly thankful, for Hieatt and Butler’s work on these texts is beyond praise. The Forme of Cury, for instance, is popularly known from its 18th-century editions. But only the other day an expensive advertisement in a food magazine was put ...”

“... a record of indefatigable research and meagre revelations, is stuffed with ‘probably’s’, ‘may’s’, ‘if’s’ and ‘just possible’s’, a case of seeking hopefully rather than arriving. Born in 1829 as the daughter of a London builder, Juliet came from ‘the artisan rather than the professional classes’. Miss Oliver is faintly surprised ...”

“... repertoire. Modern analysts do not esteem such notes (the article on analysis in The New Grove may well repudiate the method). They are deliberately superficial. As they are to be read at concerts, too great a detail would get in the way. The sadness is that many biographies of composers, and some studies of historical epochs, adopt the approach. This is ...”

“... when the latter depends for its main defence needs upon thousands of US military technicians may appear illogical, but such reverses of fortune and judgment are common enough in this context. The forces of Islam, deplored in the case of insurgent Iran, are deemed by many Western politicians to have new-found freedom-loving potential in the case of ...”

“... By ‘family structure’ many things may be intended. I shall take it here in two senses. First, in the sense of composition of the co-resident domestic group, as the historical sociologists call it. This means the knot of persons who live together, man, wife and sometimes, but by no means always, their children, their relatives, if any, along with their servants, now excessively rare ...”

“... if not the imagination of lay commentators on language, then their bile; most of them, though they may not know it, are diehard diachronicists, for whom etymology is also explanation. They are oblivious to what Saussure has to say about ‘values and co-existing terms’. The values of words are not the same as their meanings, although it is not always easy to ...”