“... act: citizens have a right to call on an elected office-holder to resign, just as he or she may choose to stay in office until defeated at the polls. The petition said nothing about the army, let alone calling on it to act in the matter. The same was true of the mobilisation for the 30 June demonstrations. Several well-known groups that had played key ...”

“... The first​ big leader to livestream a message to the virtual World Health Assembly on 18 May was supposed to be Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa and chairman of the African Union, but something went wrong with the feed. Xi Jinping went first instead. We saw the president of China seated behind a highly polished table, in front of a mural showing rosy dawn creeping over the Great Wall ...”

“... should not admire life ‘as does the American’, although he occasionally by good chance may have admired some of it, he recoiled from most of it. If he was to live he must escape from the surface of life, and he found his asylum in his dreams; here was his workshop where he mended life … only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his ...”

“... on Victorian and modern literature are published now. The theoretical essays will come out next May. Born in 1928, Miller took his first degree in science. He converted to literature as a graduate and was steeped in New Criticism during its most doctrinaire phase. He describes his emancipation from its discipline as something comparable to Dorothea’s loss ...”

“... now. It came out in French in 1964, taking a quarter of a century to reach translation. What, one may wonder, have the French been up to meanwhile? One answer comes from Volume One of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, also a translation from the originals of Michel Rouche, Evelyne Patlagean and others. This, too, is a most engaging ...”

“... In a spirited attempt to forestall criticism, Margaret Doody warns her readers that they may ‘feel horrified at what they they regard as a changeling-substitution of a mad Gothic feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in Evelina and the Journals, Professor Doody sets out to present an altogether different version ...”

“... cannon in Central Europe. At the moment, however, he seems less than enchanted by the idea and he may be tempted to see what more he could get from Lafontaine should the GDR give the latter the margin of victory that might elude him in the Federal Republic alone. Nato still matters because the Soviet Union is still in possession of the formidable apparatus of ...”

“... just given me Something no one else on earth had ever given me I may even have thanked him habit being so strong. The ominous miniature ‘Quiet Nights’ might epitomise Carver’s imaginative transactions between two points, the first fixed, the second problematic: I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another. Boat all ...”

“... the warm meat of her loins on his questing finger’ kind. News from Nowhere begins with the 1968 May ‘revolution’ in Paris: a great and blissful moment. It ends with a ‘loving’ wire break at Greenham Common by a grotesque band of de-sexed, hate-filled harpies who represent for Caute the very end of the line. The first sections of the novel, which are ...”

“... he explains, because ‘child protection agencies made access to children impossible.’ But one may feel that the omission is a ‘serious defect’ of the most unarguable sort, such that Dr Li should have contemplated redesigning his research once the agencies created obstacles (if this is indeed what happened). So much hinges on the experience of the ...”

“... is partly devoted to a critique of Neusner, and is a Significant salvo in a continuing battle that may decide the future course of rabbinic studies. Sanders’s book may be regarded as a series of learned appendices to Jesus and Judaism (including a detailed reconsideration of Jesus’s alleged clashes with the ...”

“... when Armageddon was scheduled to begin, was the civilian hero of the Gulf War. The only thing that may have puzzled them was his title. How could a man edit reports coming from all quarters of the globe if he deliberately isolated himself under conditions of siege? On this matter From the House of War provides little help, except for a passing reference to the ...”

“... at will. Discussion and electivity were characteristic of the Party’s internal procedures. It may be that what inhibits Pipes from recording this is a feeling that by doing so he would somehow be making the Bolsheviks into democrats. This is not a necessary conclusion. The Bolsheviks had constantly paraded their lack of commitment to following democratic ...”

“... too, like all migrants, am a fantasist,’ declares the narrator of Shame, and the proposition may be a reversible one. In Rushdie’s prose the migrant occupies a specific geographical and temporal position, ‘wandering between two worlds’. (In The Satanic Verses these are, literally, Bombay and London.) In the introduction to Imaginary Homelands the ...”

“... of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring the new growth of leaves.’ There is almost a Bethlehem feel about this: a new light in the sky and various ...”