“... be impossible in the first place. Dreyfus and Rabinow are aware of these difficulties, and it may have been at their instigation that Foucault wrote the section of the ‘Afterword’ entitled ‘How is power exercised?’ On my own reading of that essay, Foucault defends himself against the common charges of political conservatism, moral nihilism and ...”

“... available permitted definitive judgments on the episode from both sides. Such a long interval may be comforting to scholars but it will clearly not do for journalists, politicians and, above all, defence experts who are eager to derive immediate lessons from such an unexpected but valuable proving ground as the Falklands war. Still, it is as well to ...”

“... any importance in society? We will then be able to say how near Pope came to Juvenal. Meanwhile it may be observed that the poems in question seem to contain no reference to such an approach; also, although Juvenal may well have annoyed some of his contemporaries, he did not employ the name of anyone who was both alive and ...”

“... looked down on them. Lord Lambton’s heroines are of the same flesh as us, though their blood may be bluer. Maria Luisa Bombal specialises in the portrayal of another kind of aristocratic heroine, commuting between the labyrinthine South American cities and dense, tropical landscapes which secrete occasional, decaying estates, taking refuge from the ...”

“... are there to be drawn. The first, though Hersh never quite says it, is that the Presidency itself may have a flaw, a flaw made worse when the incumbent is a Nixon: its power is monarchical. The President of the United States is the executive. His power rests on a piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George ...”

“... was uncharacteristically backward in dishing out his unfashionable medicine: ‘Cecil Parkinson may have broken one of the Ten Commandments. He has also been foolish. But there has been nothing vicious in his behaviour. He has been involved in a human drama, now a human tragedy, almost banal in its ordinariness.’ The Telegraph thought that ‘the public ...”

“... he know what he has said. It is also true, and for the same reason, that what the poet has said may be taken in many different ways by his readers. Blake would have agreed with Shelley’s note about God at the end of ‘Queen Mab’, that ‘the works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.’ In whatever spirit of humility a great poet undertakes ...”

“... retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may be yet more complex than his seven hundred pages allow for, since he reads neither Chinese nor Tibetan, and depends for the most part on the careful use of what is already available in English. This is nothing new: the 1993 International Conference of Lawyers ...”

“... schutterij by such artists as Bartholomeus van der Helst or Frans Hals. To the modern eye, Hals may appear to be satirising the militia, presenting their officers as knights of the knife and fork rather than the sword, better-equipped to do battle with the roast beef than with the Spaniards. I would not care to dismiss such an interpretation out of ...”

“... expect to see power in the City of London becoming increasingly concentrated in Asian hands. This may seem a wild forecast, but twenty years ago who would have thought that before long nearly every newsagent’s in the whole of Greater London would be under Asian management? The Asian takeover of small trade – it’s hard to avoid the term ...”

“... of Berenson’s style of ‘scientific’ analysis, so greatly indebted to Giovanni Morelli, we may consider the following passage dating from 1895 on a painting then in the collection of Sir William Farrer but today in the Ashmolean Museum: perhaps the freshest and most charming, as well as the earliest of all Montagna’s existing works ... the child is ...”

“... combine (in the manner of DNA, as it were) to produce a boundless variety of understandings. Or it may be that psychoanalysis has merely provided us with an excuse to remain stuck in the revolving door of self-absorption. According to Deirdre Bair, ‘sex, the self and psychoanalysis’ are three of the concepts that have brought ‘sweeping societal ...”

“... was stimulated by the pain of absence (for which Lady Bute, fostering her husband’s ambition, may have been secretly grateful). Lady Mary returned to England only after her husband’s death in 1761; she died a year later of breast cancer. In her lifetime she was the victim of many covert sneers and attacks, which redoubled after she did the scandalous ...”

“... The world, he says at the end of The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), ‘is our beloved codex’: We may not see it, as Dante did, in perfect order, gathered by love into one volume, but we do, living as reading, like to think of it as a place where we can travel back and forth at will, divining congruences, conjunctions, opposites; extracting secrets from its ...”

“... greatly preferred the 16th-century Scots of Gavin Douglas: ‘Her nek schane like unto the rois in May.’ The rose in Virgil’s ‘rosea’ is completely suppressed in the marmoreal pallor of Dryden’s language, but the real offence is that ‘refulgent’. ‘Refulgent’ in English is ponderously classical; ‘refulsit’ to a Roman was an ordinary ...”