“... about Saudi Arabia, an anomalous state with which, whatever a humanrights oriented Government may intend, Britain will continue to have close relations for many years. The standard negative images of the Kingdom were easy enough to find in the Aitken saga, and have been amply reinforced by coverage of the trial of two expatriate British nurses accused of ...”

“... Probably it means that a good way to find out what people think is just to ask them. But then, you may object, their replies will be merely subjective – no use really, if you purport to be a scientist. Take back that ‘merely’. Wash your mouth out. Feminist science is something quite different; subjectivity is of the essence. Until recently, women have ...”

“... sessions alone with great pictures acknowledges that access to all this ‘intentional activity’ may be hard: but not because the artists belong to different periods and countries. Psychoanalysis encourages the idea of an unchanging basic structure of the human mind. ‘Beliefs’ and ‘commitments’ have changed greatly, however, and if one admits their ...”

“... months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal’. The phrase was less harsh than it may seem to a modern ear, since a jackal, in the parlance of the time, was someone who busied himself on another’s behalf; but for Crane the metaphor has both a keener and a darker edge. He calls his first chapter ‘The Wolf Cub’, and finds in Trelawny a ...”

“... in 19½ years, will prevent the Slavery, or Murder, of 100!!’ The mathematical projection may have been rickety, but what houseproud humanitarian could resist a purchase like that? And what housekeeper could fail to ensure that the bowl was always correctly filled? It is well to remember that, in the bloody annals of prized commodities, sugar occupies ...”

“... enticed scholars from throughout the Greek world to make their home at Alexandria: Euclid – who may also have been born in the dusty Egyptian village that existed on the site before Alexander founded his city – wrote his Elements there, and Archimedes passed through as a student. Eratosthenes, Strabo and Galen all relied on the riches of ...”

“... critics of GM foods are governed by mere sentiment, by soft-centred unreflective feelings that may conflict with their more considered judgments. On the other hand, if the word is understood in its 18th-century sense, sentiment is not a feeling that could fail to be engaged. In that sense, it is an emotion associated with what moves and affects us, and its ...”

“... the ‘fringe’ people will be either to conform (i.e. buy some trousers), conceding that they may not be so different in other ways either, or else to fetishise their distinctiveness as perceived from the centre. In the latter case, the revenge of the centre is sweet: send in the debunkers; Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has a selective nose for fakes, got the ...”

“... are allusions to high culture as well as to low in Echenoz: the music that blares from a car radio may be pop or it may be Buxtehude. And it’s the same with literature. In Cherokee, low-life Fred is encouraged to find that his name is a phonetic anagram of Phèdre, the Racine play he happens to be reading; and in the same ...”

“... as possible. This part, unavoidably, is written in Warrior, but in that dialect of it which may be called Humane and Intelligent Warrior. The rest is an attempt to study the psychological gap itself, which is surely the crucial issue. Strategic thinking, after all, would presumably take care of itself if tribal and emotional habits did not determine its ...”

“... in which Coleridge departed from his original or followed briefly somebody else, even a specialist may feel that this material could have gone, to its advantage, in an appendix. The problem is simply readability. Following three lines of abstract, compressed argumentation, in four languages, on the one page, while leaping from one block of type to another, and ...”

“... Dances is now reissued as a paperback, in regrettably abbreviated form, with no pictures. We may trace in it the shifts and jumps of Gorer’s developing political consciousness, dancing uneasily between the back and the front half of the New Statesman. He was inclined to see (and love) his ‘negroes’ as sculptures, objets d’art, patterns of ...”

“... the biographer is left in both cases with an achievement that is certainly impressive, but which may seem too vicarious to justify a great deal of attention. It included remarkable services to the fiction of Dickens and George Eliot, but also decades of much more routine editing and reviewing for the periodicals. Finally, the personal impressions of Lewes ...”

“... made Holman Hunt paint The Awakening Conscience, for the Queen’s face has a pensive look that may be remorse, and in the background is a second figure – seated, male, and so diminished that the viewer might easily overlook him – probably intended as Lancelot. But what is startling about the painting is that none of this literary baggage is of much ...”

“... awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying the critical principles which Ricks enunciated in a recent consideration of Empson’s work. Ricks praised his critical master in this journal for speaking ‘with the direct personal commitment that, prior to the current ...”