“... 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 ...”

“... He established a JDL fund in Evans’s name that continued to exist into the Seventies. It may well be that Kahane’s present obsession with Arab men having sexual relations with Jewish women and his proposal of Nuremberg-style racial purity laws for Israel are at least in part a consequence of his guilt over the Evans tragedy. The attention Friedman ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Tom-all-Alone’s, ‘rookeries’, slum courts. One’s understanding of a given Victorian image may be seriously impoverished if one fails to measure it against the reality. Graham Davis has established that a notorious Bath rookery, Avon Street, had a much more socially and economically variegated population (including some quite well-to-do families) than ...”

“... of the Opposition whom it was rumoured might have been done away with by the KGB. James Bond may have come about as a defence mechanism, a charm against the way of life Fleming saw himself threatened with after his marriage; rather in the same way that Kenneth Grahame produced another potent bachelor fantasy, The Wind in the Willows, when he found ...”

“... two and three if you find yourself in difficulties.’ This tutorial tone, kept up throughout, may make some readers feel that he underestimates them. Certainly one keeps expecting to come upon the sort of informative illustrations that this theme, when popularised, conventionally needs: they would depict, say, a detail from Holman Hunt’s The Finding of ...”

“... and do the right thing – the reasonable, decent, liberal thing – what one comes up against may simply not be amenable to rational argument and good intentions. Such bafflement has obvious comic potential at a sod’s law level, but it can also be a cause for deeper dismay. This underlying apprehension surfaces in a rather melodramatic way in the ...”

“... to read as Freud’s detachment, coldness and barely-repressed hostility to his ‘sons’. There may have been some truth in his sense of the master. But Freud had grievances of his own, and it is essential to be aware of them, preferably by reading this journal in conjunction with the letters Freud and Ferenczi exchanged over the years. It is not that ...”

“... men in authority are the material on which to concentrate study. Once it is accepted that there may be other springs of action – two obvious candidates are demographic and technological change – it becomes sense to widen the field. Even the most old-fashioned historian has to admit that men alone can’t breed. The change allows new topics to be ...”

“... working-class involvement. Not everything, though, is unplanned. The survival of a school may depend upon market forces, but the stage at which pupils should know the placing of a comma is determined by the Secretary of State. The National Curriculum, in which these powers are embodied, is a towering, highly detailed landmark of planning, amid the ...”

“... Whatever, you may be wondering, became of the mind-body problem? This new collection of Colin McGinn’s philosophical papers is as good a place to find out as any I know of. Published over a period of more than a decade, and drawn together from the usual motley of largely inaccessible academic journals, these essays provide a vivid introduction to current views in the philosophy of mind and to their immediate precursors ...”

“... cannot aspire to be more than social chemistry ... The time for social physics is not yet here and may never come.’ Even the social chemistry is bitty, confined to ‘specifying small and medium-sized mechanisms for human action and interaction’. He would not be surprised, he remarks engagingly, if readers likened his bits and pieces to rabbits running ...”

“... tobacco. His voice is musical-metallic, – fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these decades, such company over a pipe! – We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic, – his way is thro’ Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless. And Jane ...”