“... 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 ...”

“... will seem little more than an apology for sensationalism. If pattern predominates, the characters may decline into automata. The author is likely to have his work cut out to sustain a level of psychological and emotional realism adequate to his proposed action. Even if he strikes the right balance in each separate episode, the total effect ...”

“... of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when such themes are handled.’ We may find Leavis’s circumlocution itself rather coy (‘Mrs Transome’s early lapse’), but I think it surprising that critics have not generally taken his lead and tackled the question of sexuality in the novels head-on. A glance back to contemporary ...”

“... between seeing and understanding is left nicely unresolved by a phrase in which ‘blind’ may suggest either the loss of the means to understanding or the grace of an understanding that decides its own means. Bainbridge is not a man to let understanding have its own way: he will interpret his life to his own satisfaction. He is shrewdly alert to his ...”

“... cities snugly inside their walls: outside is grass and trees. It is beginning to seem that this may be an interesting fiction. Outside the walls, some recent studies suggest, we should be visualising not just grass but under-enfranchised shanty suburbs, non-citizen peasants with a version of feudal duty to till the fields in order to feed the town, and ...”

“... seems now to evoke so different an atmosphere that I doubt if it is worth reading about: but I may be wrong. There are, of course, the exploration sports, mountaineering, fell-walking, diving, even flying light aeroplanes, where one may yet spin a good yarn based on adventures and achievements in interesting and ...”