“... MI5 and MI6, whose activities continued until the abrupt departure of Burgess and Maclean in late May 1951. Until then, Britain’s security services had been sleeping, as though Josef Stalin had prepared a heavy sleeping draught for them. Blake’s MI6 masters liked his style, his linguistic talents and his quiet demeanour. He had no difficulty in joining ...”

“... not refutable in the way that a law is, but only replaceable by a superior theory, a theory which may indeed maintain some if not all of the laws of the earlier theory.’ Such elegant removal of the goal-posts to a different field of play is a feature of the Chomskyan argument to which proponents of other linguistic philosophies most commonly take ...”

“... up a conventionally romantic vision, then holds it up to ridicule. His autobiographical sketches may be nourished by nostalgia, but the nostalgia is not proof against the corrosive acid of his famous disillusionment. He is not lamenting the past for being beautiful and over: he is punishing it for being phoney and containing the seeds of the present. The ...”

“... unknown. Perhaps it says something about our cultural values that, in informed society, people may never have heard of a scientist such as Maxwell when even a British schoolboy would be considered grossly uneducated if he had never heard of Dickens. The publication of the first volume (of three) of Maxwell’s scientific papers and letters gives us a rare ...”

“... since then in electronics and computing power, and the black market in weapons-grade plutonium, may not have made it as easy now as many people, including Cathcart, fear. On the test itself, a combined operation of nightmarish difficulty at a site only marginally preferable to Piccadilly Circus, Cathcart actually outdoes his mistresses. And across it all ...”

“... of biographies and autobiographies, Wagner-Martin worries that ‘choosing to write about a woman may not be the way to literary success: women usually lead lives that seem less interesting to readers.’ Such sweeping claims may have held true for an older generation. Carolyn Heilbrun recalls in the late Thirties and early ...”

“... itself out. What it then cancels into is realism: the political hope that real-life criminals may also be brought to book, that a Tory Britain in which the sick are left in the corridors of bed-starved hospitals may get its comeuppance. It is an index of the difficulty of totalising that system that this novel falls ...”

“... when it came, was by way of the royal prerogative of mercy. Indeed, this collection of tales may be read as a foot-note to the emergence of the theory and practice of absolutism among the Valois kings of France: as absolutism’s apologist Jean Bodin remarked, a royal pardon was one of the ‘ fairest marks of sovereignty’. The circumstances of the ...”

“... as a Christian continuation of the Roman Empire. Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Day 800 may symbolise ‘the birth of the West’, but only as the point on which rays of influence from all over Europe converged. The dark octagon of Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen contains the whole inheritance of the religious and political history of Western ...”

“... with the two men have found Carrington likeable (of course), but not Tebbit. I suspect that may be because at home in England his Whitehall minders kept personal contacts to a minimum, and thus allowed his unattractive public image to flourish. In my dealings with him, however, I never found him the ‘semi-housetrained polecat’ that Michael Foot once ...”

“... true extent of his own involvement, as well as that of a mysterious character known as Dook who may or may not be the mastermind behind the drugs ring. The NDIU report he dismisses – supported to some extent by the then Assistant Commissioner Colin Hewett – as hearsay evidence which cannot have any relevance as long ...”

“... has been addressed to the Standard by Lord Salisbury’s House Steward. The Editor of the Standard may, perhaps, be allowed to add that he is not much in the habit of receiving telegraphic instructions from House Stewards; not even when they are in the household of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness ...”

“... the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.Perhaps so, but we may be forgiven some doubt as to whether the fascination of Bloom’s ‘full identity as a woman’ is really what has got her book analysed in newspaper columns, crowed over at cocktail parties and passed about among friends with the relevant pages increasingly ...”

“... that he needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse. But whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one. Bookish children are advised to get their noses out of a book and take some fresh air. (As a troubled adolescent myself, reading obliviously in the midst of a performance of family life, I was given knitting needles and wool.) And ...”

“... to be, many of them were soon adopted by players who never joined the camp, and so on. All this may well be true, but the reader still wants to know what the battle was all about, and is offered only the sketchiest description. The same holds good of Eales’s accounts of the famous players of the past. We learn about their lives and careers, the games they ...”