“... in the poem ‘producing the illusion that is was written specially for me, however well I may know that it was written for the whole nation, or for no one in particular’. The voice with personality, and for that reason with authority, determined ‘this collection of my favourite poems’. It is an incisive principle and pays off well: it makes a ...”

“... say, ten thousand years, too short a time for any transitional stages to show up as fossils – may stay the same for five to ten million years after that. The process by which a new species is formed is apparently too fast to show up in the fossil record, but too slow to be observed in human experience. ‘No utterly convincing case of true speciation ...”

“... cannot be entirely due to the fact that the longest of them is an address to the Press Club. It may seem extraordinary that the most solid sections of this volume are devoted, not to the rarified intellectual concerns among which the author moves so easily, but to matters of family history – certainly, in the case of such a family, of more than private ...”

“... even trouble to make a list and puts forward no claim to theoretical completeness. The boundaries may vary and the list may be extended. He reproves me for having called the theory of genres a classification, and I take his point. Fowler sees the literary kinds rightly, not simply as a system of labels deduced post facto ...”

“... its deeper meaning – just what Freud predicted would happen in the United States.’ Bettelheim may well have earned an attitude of self-assurance, but it is astonishing how he turns a subtle and difficult issue into one that is unambiguously straightforward. No less a historian of ancient culture than Jean-Pierre Vernant has written that ‘there is no ...”

“... his natural medium. ‘I do not think that people want love most,’ he writes in his Journal (12 May 1946): ‘they need the settled reveries, the calm testing and tasting of their past and the world’s past ... I am talking about “people” when I mean “me”.’ It surprised Welch very much when he found himself sharing a successful ménage with the ...”

“... with another over a period of many years, is in fact unlikely to be repeated here. A better guide may well be Canada, which has experienced no fewer than six minority governments since 1957 and, be it noted, is none the worse for that. What will probably happen when next the Conservative and Labour Parties both fail to win a majority is that the larger will ...”

“... Productive. Efficient member of the workforce.’ Productive and efficient the steel-driving hero may be. Articulate narrator he is not. His solidity makes a point about Solidarity. His humble reflections on the upheaval around him may even be eloquent in his native Polish. But working-class vernacular must vie with poetry ...”

“... own to dismiss as prejudiced, Utopian, sentimental and counter-productive every suggestion he may venture to make about what ought to be done. For this, the most effective technique – perhaps the only technique which can even hope to be effective – is to make such people ask themselves how they would react if they had to live the lives that the poor ...”

“... Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare State’. This ‘crisis’ – the quotation-marks are to ...”

“... traditional leadership undermined and educated people wiped out or driven into exile, there may not be the wherewithal to establish representative government of any kind. This is not the case in the Sudan. There are all too many people waiting to form a government. President Nimeiri’s 16 years in power were characterised more by political confusion ...”

“... that it has no hope of reforming society, there is no useful point in the enterprise. Results it may well have, but bad ones. The trouble most Britons experience is not in telling a masculine ‘he’ from a generic ‘he’ but in telling ‘he’ from ‘him’ (‘He said it was to be kept between he and I’). Rapped by pedants and yet subjected to ...”

“... horse-dealers or lumberjacks. The conversational tone as she writes ‘home’ to Denmark may make it easier for the unconverted to understand why Out of Africa is accepted as her greatest achievement. Devotees of Karen Blixen have often sought between the lines of her African books and found nothing personal enough to satisfy their curiosity: a sense ...”

“... were traded in for some fireside modesty. ‘In the years to come,’ he said once, ‘people may decide that we went about things in the worst possible way, that we got it all wrong. We’ll just have to see.’ But with Walesa there was always the likelihood of a flip retort, a quick get-out for a man who had spent his life trying to avoid the ...”

“... mine. Music is truly the sound of our time, since it is how we most deeply recognise the home we may not have: the loss is trust and you could reverse that without change. The shared finiteness of language, structuring the infinite and unique particulars of experience into identifying patterns, inevitably falsifies. Elsewhere Prynne writes of ‘cosmetic ...”