“... herself told a friend that she thought her gardens were ‘better than her books’. However that may be, they were clearly more ephemeral: one of the most poignant episodes in Lee’s biography concerns Wharton’s devastation when a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1928-29 wiped out virtually everything she had planted at Hyères. ‘How dangerous to ...”

“... It made​ perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it ...”

“... Be that as it may, I’m wakened by the moans not of the wind nor the wood-demons but Oscar Mac Oscar, as we call the hound who’s wangled himself into our bed; ‘Why?’ ‘Why not?’ He lies between us like an ancient quoof with a snout of perished gutta- percha, and whines at something on the roof.                § I’m suddenly mesmerised by what I saw only today: a pair of high-heels abandoned on the road to Amherst ...”

“... class and used to burdens. And the years come and go, dragging their feet in true Lewis fashion. I may leave tomorrow. All day counting seagulls, then back to the hotel: lotus and potatoes yet again! You could not start a revolution here if you had all the world’s unhappiness crammed into a fifty gallon drum and the drum heaving and rumbling and moving of ...”

“... an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special ...”

“... It may be that the grotesque world of the small wars waged by the Reagan Administration in Central America has faded from public memory. Even at the time, there were never that many who were prepared to make the effort to distinguish between Nicaragua and El Salvador, let alone the even more obscure Honduras and Costa Rica ...”

“... 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 ...”