“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would be graceless to grumble; and the cold eye seems disconcertingly aware of what our reactions may be, frequently addressing us as ‘Reader’, with a little flip of the wrist. In any case, the reader interested in the American stage and screen in the Thirties would certainly be gripped by the last quarter of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the crest of the wave by the enormous financial and critical success of In Memoriam. But it may be that her closeness, in every sense, enhanced the doubleness which is an invisible and often incongruous presence in later poems, as if a ‘correct’ persona were sometimes being needled into word magic by an incorrect and unregenerate one. This is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Greene and Durrell on the whole do not, and are honest and solid achievements, even though they may lack the touch of real originality in, say, J.G. Farrell’s trilogy. Burgess’s later Enderby Trilogy, by contrast, already shows too much self-indulgence, and his fatal tendency to achieve an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a ...”

“... light at pedestrian crossings for four or five minutes even if there isn’t a car in sight. These may be trite examples but Switzerland’s love of rules has more sinister manifestations, such as people denouncing their neighbours to the police for quite minor infractions of the law. Mitya New’s book, a series of interviews with people who at different ...”

“... 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 ...”