“... sort of egomaniacal faith in our own noses that Nietzsche and Heidegger had in theirs. Such faith may be a necessary condition for the production of works of genius, but we non-geniuses who think of ourselves as tolerant and open-minded had better try to lose this faith. We will be willing to separate someone’s life from his or her work precisely insofar as ...”

“... Markovic is popular throughout the country, and if Yugoslavia is to remain intact a good deal may depend on him. But the problem of unity goes far beyond the issue of the status of Kosovo. One of the sparks for the latest disturbances in Kosovo was the decision of the League of Communists of Slovenia to walk out of an emergency Communist Party ...”

“... of the purists, they are compromised. So, of course, are untold millions of Romanians, and what may prove to be of greater significance is that these two groups represent different moral and political schools of thought. Add to that the Front’s occasional proletarian revolutionary, and it is hard to believe that unity will be maintained for ...”

“... people in the middle of totally unfamiliar cultures which are now only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start reflecting on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit ...”

“... gets her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s. She does not see what the women of Hasnapur, who may be old at 22, know: that there are no insides and no outsides. These Americans come from a place where ‘the language you speak is what you are.’ Darrel, the pig-farmer who has named his dog Shadow, asks Jane to come up with a pretty name for the golf club ...”

“... his Disraeli disconcerting reading for the more impressionable members of Blake’s own party. He may have been expected to act as the keeper of the bones of the saint. Instead, he revealed where the bodies were buried. Iconoclasm of this sort was unanswerable. It was worse than de-Stalinisation; Humpty Dumpty himself was better capable of being stuck ...”

“... almost to the point of nausea.) Apart from the always disconcerting question of why novelists may be utterly despised by their fellow-countrymen and revered by foreigners, this generous lack of belief in the business of literary criticism is very revealing. How right he is that what she found in the book is ultimately what matters, and how rare it is for ...”

“... to in the scales of human behaviour, rather than of poetry the verbal matter – although I may be drawn into making incidental references to it. Another way of describing my point of view, here, is to say that I am trying, here, to function in the field of human criticism rather than in that of literary criticism. (In my fundamental attitude to poetry ...”

“... and his back-packers all die underground in an explosion and fire that the cult leader himself may have caused. A year later, a man from Melbourne and a woman from Boston arrive in Outer Maroo looking for their lost children. They meet up with Mercy and Jess, two of the three female witnesses at the centre of the story, and give the final prod that sets ...”

“... that he does not expect to solve the ‘mysteries’ of his life sounds humble enough, but it may be associated with an element of insouciance in the novel which is unsettling at times. The narrative becomes increasingly episodic, and the function of such sequences as Maud’s brief career as a spiritualist remains enigmatic. The question of how she gains ...”

“... people could barely stay alive. People do not starve to death now, and, miserable though the level may be, they can get Income Support rather than having to break up stones for a bowl of gruel. We may be in a pessimistic age, and yet who could be so blinkered, after reading this book, as to deny that in terms of food ...”

“... attitudes to laughter for more than fifty years, and his book is clearly a labour of love. So, he may appreciate a further example, from the Qumran scrolls outlining the regulations of the Essene community not long before the time of Christ. Members of the community were required to ‘do penance’ for particular lengths of time, depending on their ...”

“... else lurking behind it. The Jarrow marchers were nearing London. ‘The Bill’s main targets may have been the Fascists, but it would never have reached Parliament as a legislative proposal had not the anti-Fascists asserted themselves in typical fashion at a peculiarly opportune time.’ The ‘dreaded unemployed marchers’ were also therefore in the ...”

“... nation listen to stuff that has descended to this low level.’ ‘Students,’ he wrote on 5 May 1944, ‘are being hunted down for labour. University students are transporting earth in civil engineering projects and are loading and unloading commodities ... The special characteristic of wartime Japan is not to think about either scholarship or the ...”

“... sea, encounters, on the one hand, ocean conditions, the vast Pacific swell underlying whatever may be the disturbances brought by local weather or current, and on the other, the extreme turbulence of water in narrow gorges, of deadly whirlpools in straits. There are huge submerged logs that would tear the boat asunder, and whales suddenly surfacing, with ...”