“... screen of hysteria blots out the folded hemlocks.’ It was decades later that poets such as John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon helped Anglophone poetry to a convincing use of Surrealist licence for its own ways and meanings. In any case, at the end of the Thirties Gascoyne himself had effectively abandoned Surrealism, and with it ‘The Rites of ...”

“... 1962 Immigration Act cut the flow of immigrants from over 100,000 a year to around 70,000, but it took the shock of the 1964 Smethwick result to make Labour reduce that number to 50,000 a year after 1965. With that, the political class regarded its work as done, but the issue simmered on in the pubs and clubs until Powell’s speech of 20 April 1968. It was ...”

“... to such early Frankfurters as Habermas’s mentors Horkheimer and Adorno, modernity’s ills took their rise from the Enlightenment, which had exalted an instrumental (or as Habermas would say, a ‘strategic’) conception of rationality. All this has now vanished: Between Facts and Norms completes Königsberg’s revenge on Frankfurt. What gives ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”

“... a series of actions leading to the desired conclusion. Thus the beginnings of cognitive science took the general form of attempts to investigate a series of actions or events that lead to a designated goal. It need not of course be a single series; it can be a tree composed of many series culminating in the goal. But a series of what? Don’t we just recall ...”

“... about the size and capability of the enemy forces. A day or two before the ‘invasion’, Sir John Glubb informed Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, that the Zionists had 65,000 trained men. Azzam was surprised by this but replied: ‘I expect it will be all right. I have arranged to get up seven hundred men from Libya.’ On being asked ...”

“... Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards the edge of the Downtown cluster of corporate towers, and makes a subversive play on them by actually being two towers, only ten feet apart. Their surface is refinedly ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... Parliament. Despite the undoubted drift away from Britishness over the past decade or so, the SNP took a slightly lower share of the vote than the 30.4 per cent it attained in the October 1974 general election. How do we explain the coexistence of apathy, unionism and genuine nationalist enthusiasm? During the referendum campaign Donald Dewar, the Secretary ...”

“... flock. What the landlord did not take in rent, or the gombeen man on interest payments, the priest took on tithes which were very often of his own invention. Most of all, though, the priest and the people conspired in an attitude of such repressive severity towards sexual matters that, for all its traditional generosity and sympathy in other respects, the ...”

“... tasselled affair inscribed in Victorian homily-Gothic lettering, God knew Elvis Was tired, so he Took him to Rest. The ‘Fantastic Elvis Presley frisbee’ is only £1.25. And you can even order ‘your very own Elvis painting or sketch from our special Elvis artist Tommy Heyburn. Mr Heyburn is easily the best Elvis artist today.’ Farther out in the ...”

“... man sent man with one proud look towards the tree, and he was gone, the humble one, and there he took the poison and returned at dawn are an off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of ...”

“... like ‘composed’, ‘resolve’ or ‘tonic’, also have a psychological reference? The Greeks took very seriously music’s power to heal and assuage, just as Wagner insisted that the greatest absolute music could ‘heal’ and ‘cleanse’. In Parsifal, ‘Nur eine Waffe’ brings an unmistakable and profound sense of release – but from what, into ...”

“... is an oddity, on the face of it, that she should be so much admired by the cohort from which she took General Tilney, Sir Thomas Bertram, Mr Woodhouse and Sir Walter Elliot.) Is Barbara Pym, too, a novelist for older men? Certainly they have so far been more gallant and vociferous than women in championing her. Lord David Cecil, ...”

“... Infatuated with his own historical dream, according to which, ‘like Kokoschka, Schoenberg took his initial step into a new world of feeling within the framework of lyric poetry, but then quickly broke into the open with a radical turn to theatre,’ he ignores the all-important part which purely instrumental thought played in this critical phase of ...”