“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life peer who could convincingly be cast in the role of even the feeblest village Hampden. Peers may speechify to their hearts’ content, but the party which controls the House of Commons can reverse any defeat inflicted on it in the House of Lords as it pleases. If it doesn’t, it’s nothing to do with respect for individual liberty or the public ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tide of lives, from the tenderness I saw in thousands of eyes watching me together. This message may not come to all poets, but anyone who has felt it will keep it in his heart, will work it into his poems. Luis Poirot’s photographic study of Neruda and Nerudiana was originally published, in a limited edition, in Chile in 1986, during the Pinochet ...”

“... disgracefully cowardly circumstances, when he was ejected by the then chairman of selectors, Peter May. It is necessary to know his approach to captaincy, which, as seen from the periphery, was the equivalent of riding a bike with your feet on the handlebars (he would argue that provided you don’t crash you would still get to the bottom of the hill this ...”

“... thejaymakesanswerasthemagpiechatters andalltheairisfilledwithpleasantnoiseofwaters It may be asked how readers were supposed to tell that ‘allnight’ at the end of the first line belonged to ‘aroaringinthewind’ rather than ‘theraincameheavily’, or that ‘inthedistantwoods’ belonged to ‘thebirdsaresinging’ rather than ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... removed from common human speech to devise questions that no one has ever asked in order that they may provoke suitably ingenious answers. I do not know that this is exactly a crisis in literary criticism. In a world full of sin and misery what happens in the arts faculties of universities rarely deserves the name of crisis. And it is not so much an occurrence ...”

“... or perhaps because of them. In Hollywood, no one will ever say ‘no’ to an idea. Someone else may be fool enough to pick it up and develop it. It may become, at some future date, desirably hot. The closest a person comes to ‘no’ is ‘I pass.’ Rarely wishing to show his hand, everyone with power in the industry ...”

“... over the man in the field. But to the blue-collar, semi-employed youths who yell for Rambo, may this moment not suggest the revenge on Sony, Nissan, Toyota and Mitsubishi? Today’s cold war with Asian capitalism excites scarcely less passion than did the hot one with Indo-Chinese Communism. Rambo as protectionist paradigm? The screen, a smaller one ...”