“... the contrary, solitude was always attractive, and his mysterious journey to consult the Army in May 1968, during the crisis, was possibly a means of recovering a precious solitude). But he was not seeking isolation. With De Gaulle we are not, apparently, dealing with a man who is planning his accession to power, in the sense that there are politicians who ...”

“... hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by Professor Fussell and his precursors may make it appear. For it rests on an underlying assumption that Americans treat each other as if they were all, whatever the other differences between them, of common social origin. None of them seriously believes that they are, any more than they believe that ...”

“... two covers will be counterbalanced by their price; and libraries, in this age of austerity, may think twice before buying duplicates of material they already possess. The Road to Middle-Earth, by T.A. Shippey, sets out to explore Tolkien’s imaginative writing in relation to the texts he studied and to the scholarship he published. Shippey thereby ...”

“... art, at any rate some great art, is amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short of, which may even seek out, gratuitous ferocities. I fear that when I with too much aplomb urged him to essay ‘the deeper reaches’, I had myself not taken account of the sharks and barracuda which swim in those depths. For I too, like Dennis Enright though a few years ...”

“... practically every US critic who is actually qualified to pass expert judgment on its contents. One may simple-mindedly attribute these contrasting responses to FBTOH to the disrepute into which all architecture seems to have fallen in the popular media, so that any book knocking modern architecture is guaranteed a welcome from everybody but modern architects ...”

“... and the evolutionary biologists split into sociobiologists and the rest – separate species, we may suppose, since intercourse between the two has not so far proved fruitful. Stephen Gould’s contribution to this last debate is to open one or two coffins containing the scientific skeletons of the past with the purpose of nailing down the lids even more ...”

“... trilogy, some of them, like Apthorpe, pushed to the edge of caricature: but although the people may be comic, the war itself is a serious matter. There is something dotty about Ritchie-Hook, the defence of Crete is a shambles, but in the end Waugh’s work belongs within the realistic tradition of the English novel. So does Olivia Manning’s Balkan ...”

“... internal government airline, Aeropostal, was known to its riders as ‘Aeromortal’. It may even say nothing against the argument that in the later Seventies, more than twenty years after Hirschman had had the thought, it was still the case that there were more ‘black star’ airports, as the International Airline Pilots’ Association denotes ...”

“... to the observer’s eye the same proximal stimulus pattern as does the real scene.’ The picture may thus be construed as a section through the visual pyramid, and if, with Leonardo, we imagine this as a pane of glass, the artistic success consists in marking the glass’s surface in such a way that there is no perceptual difference to be registered between ...”

“... see Auld Reekie,’ Stevenson wrote to his fellow Scottish novelist S.R. Crockett from Samoa in May 1893, eighteen months before his death: ‘I shall never set my foot upon the heather. Here I am until I die and here will I be buried.’ But, as he told another correspondent, his head was ‘filled with the blessed, beastly place [i.e. Scotland] all the ...”

“... of South Africa, which seeks to anticipate almost every conceivable problem and circumstance that may arise in the future. What, exactly, constitutes the ‘equal protection of the law’ guaranteed to citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment? How far may Congress go to promote the ‘general welfare’? The Constitution’s ...”

“... trend – ‘re-enacting the hubris of the Romantics’ – by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese). It may well indeed be high time that classical scholarship, too, thought harder about the kinds of voice it chooses to hear (or to speak with). When Braund, for example, chooses to admit that she would rather read A.S. Byatt than the American Journal of ...”

“... with what was called the ‘emancipation of the flesh’ – even if his writings, like theirs, may make present-day readers wonder how ‘emancipatory’ this concern really was. Against the mechanistic science of the 18th century, and the arid rationalism he found in Descartes, Büchner, like Goethe, insists that nature is a living organism. He ...”

“... of the Caribbean as well as Latin America – the word for fig is used of the banana, so this may be another example of those inspired clerical slips which result in widespread conventions. That the figleaf is hard to fix to the body every child confronted with a Renaissance statue has noticed. Banana leaves, on the other hand, can be draped and threaded ...”

“... and doubts. So good are Jenny Uglow’s discussions of the Gaskell novels that the actual texts may not quite live up to them, although she conveys their virtues with a kind of discernment very much in tune with her subject’s own. As one would expect, Mrs Gaskell got steadily better as a writer as she went on, learning and perceiving more until the moment ...”