“... to the other, it cannot seriously be held that they constitute a single nation, but FitzGerald may have come as close to reality in his use of such terms as is consistent with political survival in the Republic. The author recognises that, as a condition for unity by consent, the Republic should ‘provide the same civil liberties in the whole island as at ...”

“... other hand, Madame Magritte’s corpse, after its recovery, spent a night in the house: Magritte may have seen her face covered with a sheet to conceal the effect of 17 days’ submersion in the polluted waters of an industrial river. His uncle, who had identified her, could have told him that her face was covered to avoid having to describe her ...”

“... scepticism so deep that for some time he refused to believe that Gorbachev was ‘for real’, and may have had some influence in persuading members of the Reagan and Bush Administrations of his view. Though I have heard him admit that this was a mistake, it is a view which many Russians still hold, and his holding of it for so long demonstrates his close ...”

“... to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra. Michael Kelly is a remarkable war artist, however. His reports have an artist’s sense of ...”

“... more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even included in the massive – if frequently trivial and banal – Contemporary Novelists. He is omitted from surveys of literature (even by those who have praised him). This is certainly undeserved neglect: but could ...”

“... an ideology, followed by his loyal, harlequin-like Russian adherent ... This stimulating fantasy may be useful for Hakim’s education, perhaps. The idea about self-styled ‘people’s parties’, Nazi or Communist, echoes a quotation from Mussolini’s theorist, Argento Soffici, which appears as one of the 20 epigraphs to the chapters. At Edenvale, outside ...”

“... readers that there are no imaginative exits from history. Rereading these lines on a damp day in May, I reflect that Keith Joseph is poised to close down a dozen tutorials on Matthew Arnold and that Holub speaks also to this society. He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must ...”

“... It is a very seductive technique, and not quite like any other in recent writing, however much it may borrow from Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, the Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Howards End. It borrows in the sense that the stories and characters deployed are mythological and exemplary, as they are in the American tradition of Hawthorne and ...”

“... had come out in 1912, F. Münzer’s Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien in 1920. One may doubt, however, whether it has ever been employed more effectively than by Syme, who apart from being a great historian is a considerable literary artist. The mandarin prose of his predecessors had run to long, flowing sentences, suggesting an affinity with ...”

“... Between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945 the Red Army of Workers and Peasants disposed of ten million German troops, destroyed over six hundred enemy divisions, liberated all of Eastern Europe and finally stormed, unaided, the ‘lair of the fascist beast’, Berlin. This achievement must be considered one of the most extraordinary in military history, for at the outset the Russians were caught completely by surprise and almost completely unprepared ...”

“... rewards and punishments, the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, to be effective. ‘Virtue may owe her panegyrics to morality, but must derive her authority from religion.’ This analysis is a particular application of a more general principle. Johnson believed that all human effort springs from the elementary passions of avoiding pain and seeking ...”

“... the working class held by employers, politicians and the formulators of popular opinion. The first may perhaps be termed the ‘high Tory’ conception of the ‘dangerous classes’ as volatile, irrational, potentially hostile. Strikes here represent latter-day peasants’ revolts, always liable to get out of hand. On this view, effective containment of the ...”

“... so that (like Imlac crossing deserts and mountains for ‘images and resemblances’) he may draw if he wishes on a language of atoms, anti-matter and black holes – but not, like Empson in ‘Doctrinal Point’, to cite individual physicists such as Heviside and Eddington. We may ask for ‘scientific ...”

“... On 10 May 1933 an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, wrote in her diary a description of the clothes she was wearing on that sultry summer’s day. The description includes the phrase blue celanese trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles ...”

“... instance, in his comment on the ‘Nika riot’ of AD 532: ‘That ... is the sort of price that may have to be paid for the total suppression of proper democratic rights.’ Compare also his remarks on the population of Rome in the late Republic: ‘If indeed they were to some extent demoralised and depraved, it was largely because the oligarchy had made it ...”