“... she is merely being made forceful love to by a version of Pushkin’s Charsky (now an actor, who may have a part in the blind director’s Dr Zhivago, if his penis pleases). Meanwhile the rapist is being buggered by a young thug with Aids. All this lying together gets very complicated, especially as just a few pages ago Charsky was scaling the North Face of ...”

“... back of a truck talking to a girl as the sun goes down.’ His attachment to quiet epiphanies here may strike us as a little dated: but perhaps it shouldn’t, since these are hardly period-specific pleasures. And one wouldn’t want to line up with the point-scoring American film critics of today, reviled by Wenders in the Introduction as lacking ‘modesty ...”

“... finds ‘a summer-like repose’ in accepting his fate, ‘a self-contained, irresponsible, devil-may-care indifference to the future as it looks to younger eyes; a feeling mat one’s bed is made, and no one can rest on it till it becomes necessary to go to bed forever ...’ This stoic pose is comically at odds with the histrionic player who over-reacted to ...”

“... and the rest of it. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing feeling about that something irreversible may be happening in the world, and that it is not to Britain’s advantage. Simply put, the fear is that as geo-economics take over from geo-politics, Britain’s long day in the international sun may be waning; that we shall ...”

“... Like his predecessors, he is effectively without a job until the throne becomes vacant – which may not be until well into the next century. Meanwhile there is no longer an empire to provide him with the appropriate apprenticeship of a proconsular posting, and he is understandably eager to do more than accompany his wife on her shopping trips. But while his ...”

“... stay with all of us for the rest of our lives and indeed, at the present rate of attrition, it may be something that will only survive in the memory. The combined effect of incessant bombardment with the onset of a Balkan winter may snuff out everything I saw. On a paved street in the centre of town, near the Eternal ...”

“... content and moral force that they continue to mark a deep cleavage in Western philosophising. Jung may have meant that we start out as realists or nominalists and follow our assigned destinies. His maxim reaches far beyond that. We are either Plato’s friend or Aristotle’s friend. Murdoch brings her friends, Schopenhauer, Simone ...”

“... New English Bible and the Revised English Bible of the 1960s and 1989 respectively. Every age, it may be supposed, gets the translation it deserves: the blandness of these last two attempts seems to bear out the old clerical-donnish joke that only bishops are improved by translation, where Tyndale’s one-man, plain sinewy, supple, lively version belies ...”

“... passage from Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life: ‘But whereas, through fear of death one may desire to die, and may find all his interests converging upon this single purpose, such notions are loath to permeate the tissues, and the wish never to have been born is unknown to our organs and our senses.’ Presumably ...”

“... and ‘surmise’ and is ever scrupulous – with her ‘quite possibly’s, ‘perhaps’s, ‘may have been’s – not to overstate the nature of her case. As far as I am concerned, the only test when offered such a conjecture is: is it interesting and plausible? The answer in this case is: yes on both counts. I am also perfectly ready to believe that ...”

“... symbolic to Joseph Banks of paradise found (almost): ‘In the article of food these happy people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefather; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow when their chiefest substance Bread fruit is procured with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling ...”

“... index to The Gathering Storm (‘Baldwin, Stanley ... confesses putting party before country’) may not have survived as an objective historical judgment, but even fifty years on, Britain’s preparations for the Second World War hardly look inspiring. The next long spell of Tory government in the Fifties saw Britain’s conventional forces run down without ...”

“... hampered growth, ‘national’ rivalries and feuds stimulated it; tooth-and-nail competition, it may appear, has been the price of progress. Comparison with Asia suggests that on balance Europe benefited from its self-imposed ordeals; elsewhere, both society and business enterprise were too inert to generate such struggles. There can always be too much of a ...”

“... the grounds that he is ‘less an individual than a style, a symbol, a mythology’) may seem disastrously overblown. (Has Martin not read Moby Dick, one wonders?) Nevertheless, the critical agility on display in The Mask of the Prophet may be set against Williams’s tendency to reduce literary fantasies to ...”

“... distinguished and organised by all peoples. Children catch on to them at an early age. There may he subordinate and super-ordinate classes of, for example, animals that are distinguished locally or for scientific purposes, but basic-level groupings are found around the world. Such opinions ride well with Chomsky’s beliefs about universal human ...”