“... no corruption in high places, freedom from war and crime’. Concern for individual lives? ‘We may have the best that is possible in the circumstances. There was wide support for setting up the Man Penal Settlement.’ But still he talks to the Council and the Warden, and is told by Xan that he desires the end but closes his eyes to the means. P.D. James ...”

“... begins: ‘They were a hangdog-looking pair as they rode into Liphook on that sunny morning in May. One was short and weedy, with bony shanks and a hungry countenance, the other was a little taller and a deal bulkier, but bloated of face and generally flabby. They were dressed in a soiled and tawdry imitation of their betters, and each looked every inch ...”

“... shot in a wood (another recurring JTS image) while pretending to be a pheasant. Killing him off may signify nothing more than Story’s desire to terminate one sequence of comedies before starting on another – the Horace Spurgeon Fenton trilogy drawn from his experiences in the screen trade – but it is hard not to see the means of Albert’s going as an ...”

“... Indeed, given its useful presence, and adopting a strong Fishian historical determinism, one may wonder whether epistemology is among the things grasping us and making politics imaginable. Of course, in a strong determinist world I will never know the answer to this question. I may not even be able to ask it. I wonder ...”

“... an unconscious.’ We don’t know how Huston reacted to dialogue of this degree of awfulness: he may even have liked it. The film he eventually made – Freud: A Secret Passion – and the films he has made since – Under the Volcano, for example – show that he is a sucker for windy portentousness. Perhaps the lines sounded less windy in 1959 than they do ...”

“... to look at things in the right way is identified as the radical task of the moral life. So it may seem ironic that the novels which embody and explore this insight should themselves be so difficult to see. Uncertainty about what has happened in the book, and what it’s to be taken to mean, is a usual response to a new Murdoch novel. The scope for ...”

“... Wright brothers, and all the hand-shaking and banquets in their honour when they visited London in May 1909 were merely a guise by the Liberal Administration to avoid further criticism from Northcliffe and the Air League. ‘In this way the first chapter of a novel phase of British life came to an end, in ...”

“... High German … ’ The former is also for the convenience of Everyman, for whom the dictionary may be his sole reference book. Combining the dictionary and the encyclopedia is no new idea (Cockeram did it in 1623), and the distinction between the two types of information is by no means as clear as conventional wisdom would have it. Indeed, it is least ...”

“... on this day or that, or awaiting the birth of the Shiloh to the 65-year-old Joanna Southcott. It may be that some variety of myth concerning the End is necessary to everybody, but there can be no doubt that the forms of it that have prevailed in our culture were established by the Bible – by Daniel, Revelation, and the ‘little apocalypse’ of Mark and ...”

“... that that person stole the jewels: that is to say, he knows that something, and this knowledge may indeed be a species of belief. The grammars of ‘know’ and ‘believe’ are indeed different, but more than that is needed to lead one to this sort of conclusion about knowledge and belief. Other arguments in the book are just too blunt and brisk. One of ...”

“... the text with precision. Ms Greer, whose way of saying ‘I’ is ‘the present writer’, may be addressing this soporific text to a scholarly (or at least a pedantic) readership rather than a general one. Neither are the illustrations (32 in colour plus 161 in black-and-white) likely to allure general readers by means of lust of the eye. It is not ...”

“... untestable and therefore unacceptable premise. For although the relationships that such historians may reveal, or claim to reveal for example, between economic status and artistic taste – are themselves amenable to testing, the idea that a relationship of some kind must exist between such diverse phenomena is no more than an article of faith. It need hardly ...”

“... Parliamentary friends who have an interest in the American military presence in Britain, but who may have neither the time nor the inclination to read a 340-page book. ‘Go to the Oriel Room in the Commons Library, and having got the Unsinkable Aircraft-Carrier, turn to pages 76 and 77. There you will find a map of all the American bases and installations ...”

“... the constraints of real politics and the inner logic of the administrative mind. All this may well sound worthy but rather dull, and it has to be admitted that Professor Dilks’s volume makes heavy reading. Tory historians of the Feiling school used to beguile their readers by imaginative communion with the voices of the past, unencumbered by too ...”

“... by more than eighty. Not only can the American Skyhawks be launched from the carrier 25th of May, but, with spare parts from the United States, Sidewinder missiles, and extra fuel tanks to enable them to loiter over the Falklands, they are now altogether more formidable than they were two and a half years ago. Some of the Mirage III Super-Etendards have ...”