“... the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller class consists mainly of those in the creative arts whose careers stickily attract phrases like ‘he never married, being a homosexual,’ ‘not always faithful’, ‘his amorous ...”

“... convictions. At many points, though, as they tell their stories to the author, the reader may feel that at another place on the tape possibly lie the untranscribed lineaments of such an account. It does not, however, surface in this book. Women’s adherence to Toryism is pursued by Campbell at two levels. First, Campbell has talked to 50 Conservative ...”

“... and he never quite made it as a singer). All of this is enjoyable in its way, and the book may well be read more for what it says about the author (amused by his own narcissism) and about his enemies (‘talentless louts’ etc) than for what is to be discovered concerning the Arts Council and especially the defunct Literature Department. It would be ...”

“... states of affairs (‘walking’ as a kind of event, whenever and wherever such an event may happen). In order that they might represent the worlds of experience and imagination, such symbols have to be put together with ‘indexical’ signs, as Peirce termed them, such as articles (the, some), demonstratives (this, those), tense-inflections ...”

“... is, but the process has suddenly accelerated on me.’ The worry at this stage is that the system may soon have failed entirely and we’ll be left in the lurch. I don’t relish a world without Hitchens: along with many people, I like to hear from a man of principle at moments when recourse to principle strikes him as the greater part of valour, and listen ...”

“... the track’s safety systems had been contracted out, in contrast to the usual practice, which may have resulted in the lack of padding on the column the victim collided with at turn 16. But Petroski also suggests that financial gain shaped the design. He quotes from a post-mortem in the Wall Street Journal: ‘The course’s dangers became part of its ...”

“... as if they were familiar with the works cited. If he has given up this particular pleasure it may be because he tired of the game, or because the internet has made checking so easy. (The epigraph of Harvest is from Pope, and search engines get behind it.) It would be just his style to make up a bit of Tudor inheritance law to smooth his plot, and then sit ...”

“... the earliest among them were written by someone who never met him in his earthly life; the latest may postdate his death on the cross by about a century. They are coloured by preoccupations which were not those of Jesus himself, and they fuelled the development of a church which became radically different from anything Jesus or the first generation of his ...”

“... on 20 October. The situation is being watched nervously across Latin America: the Bolivian crisis may represent a tipping point for the region as a whole. The original momentum of the Pink Tide has ebbed away, and the battle underway now is over what will succeed it. The achievements of the Pink Tide governments have been impressive, but they have also had ...”

“... man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a repressed homosexual. But what that actually means isn’t straightforward. In her essay in the Cambridge Companion, Heike Bauer writes that it was only in Stoker’s day that the boundaries of ...”

“... many forms of prophecy and the ways ancients sought to explain it. The impression of incoherence may of course be a result of the ‘scattered and partial nature of the evidence’, to quote Michael Flower, and the difficulties of interpreting what does exist. The Oxford Handbook contains a whole section on the range of sources (material, literary and ...”

“... In a city as ‘large and populous’ as London, Bernard Mandeville observed, ‘where obscure Men may hourly meet with fifty Strangers to one Acquaintance’, people were encouraged to present themselves ‘not as what they are, but what they appear to be’. The city provided the opportunities to pass oneself off as what one was not. The consumer revolution ...”

“... Reviewers rarely feel it prudent to begin by confessing bafflement, but the admission may sometimes be unavoidable. This is my sentiment as I contemplate the four novels of Alan Warner. He has been highly praised (‘dazzling’, ‘classic’, ‘significant’, ‘vastly gifted’, ‘a genius’, ‘one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever’), and I’m sure none of these eulogies, understandably preserved on the covers of his books, is entirely unmerited ...”

“... in making these charges, puts himself on a level with Kissinger, so that, however briefly, they may have to be mentioned in the same breath. His anger alerts us to the least attractive aspect of this book. There is a moment when Hitchens explains how he took the idea to the editor of Harper’s who, before Hitchens could fully explain the ...”

“... her way has nothing to do with her being a woman. Too bad, sweetie: you’ve got a problem, and it may have a legal remedy, but not because it’s a matter of sex discrimination; you don’t have this problem because you are a woman. If a man has or could have this same problem, your being female is merely coincidental to the situation in which you find ...”