“... rest-rooms in the service stations,’ an old Rhodie counselled me. I can assure him that Zimbabwe may or may not be on its way to a new social order but standards are still holding up. ‘Rhodesia is super,’ the T-shirts used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David ...”

“... state of mind as he struggled to keep the show on the road. The British public in 1940 may have supposed that inbred superiority of national character would lead to victory in the end, as in the past. But Churchill was in possession of the most secret military information, including a buff-coloured box containing the Enigma decrypts, decyphered at ...”

“... Polish patriot should work productively for the cause of the People’s Poland. But Norwid, one may suppose, never conceived of restraints and obligations without corresponding liberties. Norwid laid great emphasis on the relationship of beauty to utility. Beauty exists to enchant man into work; Work, that man may rise ...”

“... holiness of motherhood and its infinite superiority over any other occupation that a woman may take to’. As she was 34 years old at the date of their marriage, she and Sidney had agreed that parenthood was not for them, though the editors of this book mention, without disclosing their source, that the couple ‘apparently enjoyed a limited physical ...”

“... married and so, unfortunately, always carries a hateful piece of her husband around with her. He may be a bit of a bully or a coward (the character is fleshed out just enough for us to find him slightly repellent), but in essence he’s only an odious narrative impediment, someone who just keeps getting in the way. Doon, for example, is divorced but still ...”

“... Three Persons in One but Two Persons at Loggerheads, with the Third having rather little to do.It may be that the Gnostic formulation, stripped of its allegorical apparatus, is closer to the feelings of ordinary people than official Trinitarianism. It also accounts for the general approval nowadays given to the dissident theology, the revived Gnosticism of ...”

“... of “decline” raining over us’ includes those who claim to experience no such thing: ‘there may be some people for whom life-course optimism or pessimism is a solid and relatively unshakeable given, so that they infallibly pick out only those elements of the available discourses that support their chosen worldview.’ The counter-discourse is dependent ...”

“... with slices of apple and Americans who seek out little bottles of ‘Italian’ olive oil which may well have originated in Spain. In Lucca, a producer comes across a gaggle of amateur aficionados sampling on her farm, gargling and slurping and spitting on her floor as if going through the rituals of some dark Satanic cult. In Tuscany, they want to be ...”

“... is for cure or oblivion and in the last stanza just about chooses a return to the normality which may have been his undoing in the first place. In ‘Daddy Wants to Murder Me’, the poet-persona revisits his seven-year-old self, I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad under a folding one-man tent and daddy                   wants to ...”

“... them was consistent with Frieda having no ‘reluctance ... to occupy the mothering position’ may not, if judgments are called for, be so easily agreed. My own feeling is that among those who care for these matters (and they are not exclusively censorious male oppressors, as here imagined) there is much less animus against Frieda than Jackson chooses to ...”

“... idea of likening the French Revolution and particularly the Parisian mob to a parricidal monster may have occurred first to Edmund Burke. Already in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw the fomentors of revolutions as sinister magicians, the Parisian municipal army as ‘a species of political monster, which has always ended by ...”

“... a list headed by Henrik Ibsen (d.1906) and Leo Tolstoy (d. 1910). August Strindberg died on 14 May; he at least had had the consolation of a ‘People’s Nobel Prize’, awarded at the climax of a public parade through the streets of Stockholm a couple of years earlier. The fate of Benito Perez Galdos was more poignant. Though nominated in 1912 as ...”

“... final volume of Martin Gilbert’s Life opens with Churchill celebrating the defeat of Germany in May 1945. He was 70 years old and completely exhausted. Two months later, he led his party to a shattering defeat at the general election. A lesser mortal would have taken the opportunity of retiring to the backbenches as an elder statesman. But Churchill fought ...”

“... the ads apart, gives a taste of the kind of journalism which the logic of revenue and distribution may encourage. Such beasts, fat on advertisements, are not pernicious in themselves, but they do threaten their leaner rivals. To buy more printed paper when you have not got through the pile which came on Sunday seems absurd. Expense is not the only factor. Time ...”

“... looter, then visiting Shanghai when it is liberated and losing his Parker pen to a pickpocket. We may wonder about the more serious effect of losing his first two wives. One was a ‘rare beauty’ who died of puerperal fever, another abandoned him when he was attacked in an early factional struggle. Were these also occasions when the little man suffered in ...”