“... 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 ...”

“... entirely wrong to regard Gash, Tory or not, as a narrow historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof ...”

“... than Leonard Bast, low-class, anxious for promotion, fearful that he might drop into the Abyss. It may have come as a relief from all these ironies when Forster connected with PC Daley in the Twenties – for Daley was a working-class man, quite as cultivated and artistic as Leonard Bast, but not at all anxious for promotion, quite happy with the Abyss, where ...”

“... naive to take all the noise about feeling at face value, and constant exhortations to sympathy may mark its absence as much as its presence, or at least an anxiety that benevolence was fragile and fleeting. There’s no need, after all, to display notices forbidding spitting unless people are spitting a lot, and by the same token ‘the strident reforming ...”

“... and arithmetic at a privately run school intended for children who would go into trade. He may have been involved with the short-lived Poet’s School, an academy dedicated to the study of ancient letters established in the city in 1496 by Conrad Celtis, the wandering humanist scholar, who was crowned as imperial poet laureate in Nuremberg when Dürer ...”

“... people in the view; Eva Perón’s afterlife is part of a complex national identity, however one may feel about her or anyone’s politics; the notion of ‘any conceivable form of love’ does not exclude inconceivable forms. Operation Massacre, first published in 1957, with reprints in 1964 and 1969 (a movie was made from the book in 1972), is a classic of ...”

“... home unexpectedly, but he keeps missing his chance – until he suddenly suspects that his father may in fact have something to do with the horror in the pit. So it’s partly with relief, and partly with fear, that Michele discovers il Teschio’s older brother, Felice Natale (Hunt doesn’t translate his name as ‘Happy Christmas’), lurking at the ...”

“... not dead. So far, he has lost only the top part of the index finger of his right hand, though he may lose more. He works with chainsaws. Or rather, he used to work with chainsaws. He did not lose the fingertip in a chainsaw accident, though. That would be an improbable scenario, since he is right-handed: this was the trigger finger. In October last year, my ...”

“... table they could use their pocket handkerchiefs. Mountain-high above the sea, today’s passengers may not notice the first intimation of a New World close ahead, the Sargasso Sea of spent condoms washed down from those topless towers (‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ … ‘God, Aldous Huxley would love this!’). It ...”

“... said, kicking a stone, and getting himself into more philosophical trouble than he knew. We may think a kick is not much of a refutation anyway, but a kick in this case actually confirms the opposing argument, since the ‘he’ in question was Berkeley, who had argued that the world exists only as and when we (or God) perceive it. Or kick it. Johnson ...”

“... Chinese, it does not even label ‘free’ and ‘bound’ morphemes or show which compounds may be split by insertions in certain contexts, and which may not. Nor does the Pinyin show the effect of neighbouring tones on each other, which makes it an unreliable guide to pronunciation. Somewhat primitive ...”

“... are to be explained as deliberate: there is a series of secret Polish puns, and unidiomatic speech may signal moments of narrative turbulence, when the story is saying more than it appears to be. Earlier there is a famous instance of this kind of thing in Lord Jim: the significance of Stein’s parable (‘A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who ...”

“... generations of students to the engaged prose of the great periodicals of the 19th century, and may help to enable the concern with German letters to re-enter the mainstream of English literary history where it so richly belongs. Those who have read Mrs Ashton’s thesis (from which this book derives) may regret that much ...”

“... compare this with ‘A Satyr on Charles II’: His sceptre and his prick are of a length And she may sway the one who plays with th’other. Riotous behaviour like smashing up the King’s sundial may perhaps be regarded as undergraduate fun. But such frolics could lead on occasion to murder, whether in a duel or in ...”