“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... signed the certificates accepting the plant – although he knew it was sub-standard. The director took his grandchildren away, but did not alert the town. Furthermore, he got the job through pulling strings. The confrontation is heated and believable. At its height Bessmertny intrudes with a pungent suggestion. You’re building the pyramids – the tombs of ...”

“... a triumphant ending, with the title ‘How I won the General Election’. As it was, the plot took the wrong twist and the title might more appropriately have become ‘The War Between the Generals’. One of the principal problems of the warring generals was an inability to agree on strategy. At David Owen’s insistence, the Alliance’s election ...”

“... world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ovulation is spontaneous, and not the result of female orgasm, was discovered in the 1820s, but took thirty years or more to spread through the medical profession, and longer still to get through to patients. This ancient fallacy presumably encouraged men who wanted children to attend to their wives’ sexual needs. But what about couples who wanted to stop ...”

“... the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary do the same. In one historian’s words, Balfour took up Zionism as a kind of hobby, and the Declaration that bears his name was less the outcome of a serious examination of British or Allied interests than of his own uninformed infatuation – he did not think the Arab problem was serious or that Zionism would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s legacy. Throughout, we are reminded that British power to control events was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... believed, as Eliot did, in a fatal dissociation of English sensibility, except that for Eliot it took place in the 17th century, when Cromwell managed to ‘ruin the great work of time’, as Marvell put it, whereas for Davie it happened in the 18th century, when a sturdy but accommodating Dissent gave way to ranting Methodism and the amorphous tolerance of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”