“... se va ni se muere. He won’t go and he won’t die. He resigned the presidency and left Bogota in May 1830, making a trip down the River Magdalena into the tropics, ostensibly on his way to take ship for Europe. He died near Santa Marta, on the Caribbean, in December of that year. Garcia Marquez’s novel recounts those last months of Bolivar’s life but ...”

“... to the next, to the effect that Uncle Arhat’s corpse had disappeared mysteriously. ‘China may have nothing else, but it’s got plenty of people.’ A bloody defeat is really a great victory, an old man declares: ‘There are four hundred million of us Chinese. If we take on the Japs, one on one, how do you think their little country will fare? If one ...”

“... in Germany during the Second World War. But it is a long journey and, after 1050 pages, one may be left wishing it had been slightly shorter. Giovene seems to have put everything in, banal incidents as well as interesting ones, boring people along with some good characters, and he does it all in a style which is often elegant but never humorous. At ...”

“... of Crishi, who is on the make, and worse. (He is, in fact, a cad whose literary ancestors may include the central figure in Francis Iles’s Before the Fact, and even Geraldine Jews-bury’s Count Mirabeau, who enthralls the heroine of her novel Zöe.) He is cashing in on Western preconceptions about the spirituality of the East. It soon becomes clear ...”

“... Surprising though it may be to the British public, Mrs Thatcher is one of the most popular Western politicians in the Soviet Union, especially among the apparatchiki. It follows that the British Prime Minister is often a central figure in discussions among people on the left of Soviet public opinion. The experience of ten years of Conservative radicalism in Britain is too important historically to be ignored ...”

“... recordings are programmed to call consumers and question them about their buying habits. These may not get so high a response rate as real living callers: but neither are their feelings hurt when the householder hangs up on them. Time discipline, then, has given us wealth, but as Young warns us, it has also caged us and driven us to the brink, and to ...”

“... truth from the web of lies around Bitov, because his escapade is of little real significance. What may be of some importance, however, is Bitov’s background – his role as a representative of the middle echelon of journalists working on one of the most interesting Soviet newspapers, the Literary Gazette. This is not, as its title might suggest, a Soviet ...”

“... his contact with his Huguenot friends and the behaviour of the Guises and of Catherine de Medici may have had its effect on his later attitude to Mary, Queen of Scots. Be that as it may, one may also see Buchanan’s behaviour in the light of the recent verdict of Jenny Wormald: ‘given ...”

“... feeling: ‘Surely, eyes more capable than ours of receiving the range of universal radiation may well see her [the earth], this creature of argent and azure, to have robes of green and gold streamed a million miles from her by the solar wind as she dances around Helios in the joy of light.’ He has the same sense of numinous remoteness in contemplating ...”

“... made the experience of watching it quite unlike that of classic tragedy, though there, too, we may encounter torture. King Lear works with some paradigm of suffering far below the level of the daily newspaper; so, for that matter, does Beckett’s Not I. At Article Five we were too close to what was going on, as if we were spectators at the real thing, our ...”

“... Andrea Lee remarks in passing she could well investigate at large. She joins the marchers in the May Day parade and shares their exhilaration, feeling ‘a wild, childish excitement’. Yet without explanation her report turns hostile: ‘The rain began to come down harder, and still the monstrous, disorganised spectacle went on, inspiring joy in no one I ...”

“... arrangement, and it is soon to cease. With effect from the issue which goes on sale on 22 May – two issues from now, that is to say – we shall be coming out on our own, twice a month. The New York Review will be represented on the board of the company which has been formed for this purpose. But from now on the London Review will not only be edited ...”

“... who can see, and God knows Cobb doesn’t go about with his eyes shut, a first-class funeral may often be tragic, but it is also much better than a family dinner: it is a kind of photographic developer and fixer of the life of the notables. Especially in the department of the Nord: in Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing this sad ceremony was the connecting link in ...”

“... available to historians – such as letters, journals, parish registers, court records – may contain bits and pieces of detailed material of this sort, they can never be fitted together into a single coherent whole. And it is no use guessing on the basis of analogy from present to past. ‘Conjectural history’ is a waste of time. This thesis seems ...”

“... Jane Austen. As in Austen’s case, if there is a price to be paid for elegance and economy it may lie in a limitation of range. The only scene in The Old Jest that seemed to me descriptively a little unsure was the dramatic climax. There is also an unavoidable tendency towards oversimplification: we see the characters only partially, only by certain ...”