“... here and there, much awkwardness of concept, as much juvenility as sapiency ... Hate living I may, disdain people I may, long for oblivion I may; nonetheless I find existence exciting, people stimulating, oblivion not near. If I pass on to a small section of posterity the ...”

“... as the accepted leader of a new republic; and his actions during the famous événements of May 1968. In all these areas historians are obliged to take an interest in the personal element. However strong the pull of events, a great deal of importance has to be attached to de Gaulle’s own intentions. It has long been assumed that one of the reasons why ...”

“... is now published here on another page. However, a biography which elicits that sort of response may always be doing so because it is particularly penetrating. I find this biography difficult to assess fairly because of the irritation it provokes both through its crass handling of the English language and through its snide attitude towards the supporting ...”

“... reporting of events, had to be interpreted now as artistic genres concealing vested interests. In May 1916, in the middle of the war, it was still not clear to Kraus what play of Shakespeare’s was actually being performed. By October 1918 he was clear that it was Hamlet. A certain vigilance was required, Kraus began to realise, to deal with the ...”

“... and colour the composer of My Fair Lady might well have selected for his biography. Although one may suspect that two specifications worked out at a mid-Atlantic marketing conference have been accidentally switched, the American and the British designs reflect, in their sharp differences of character and aim, the problem central to any consideration of ...”

“... Professor Gilbert conjectures that this loss, and a similar and later loss to which we shall come, may be attributable to ‘the confusion of moving’ when John changed schools. It is much more probable that the relevant letters have been suppressed or destroyed because covering periods of difficulty in the relations between father and son which Mrs Kipling ...”

“... Singer, which even apes one of Joshua’s (and Dostoevsky’s) titles. Generous intentions may help to excuse the fact that a good quarter of Sinclair’s short book is devoted to summarising – for some reason, and disconcertingly, in the past tense – the plots of Joshua’s novels. It is assumed that we know enough about Bashevis’s work to get ...”

“... on the backside – and Eva and Maria did not make a sound.’ Or a wife is being punished, it may be: ‘As they descended the first flight of stairs, they heard a sharp sound that, as Mary said later, could as easily have been an object dropped as a face slapped.’ Such negations are alive, everywhere and diversely. ‘For reasons they could no longer ...”

“... purring, sighing, winking. Hope’s account of Titian’s painting is upsetting chiefly because it may be taken to suggest an affinity between a painting by an old master and such vulgar imagery. Hope’s account is also upsetting, however, because many art-historians prefer art not to be too easy to enjoy or to understand. Works of art which move us ...”

“... the victory of the un-heroic over the heroic’: ‘“Heroic” and “un-heroic” may both be misunderstood, unless we admit that for “heroic” we may substitute “barbarian”, for “un-heroic”, “civilised”. The second pair of terms tilts the scales of approval towards the English, as the first ...”

“... beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, ‘All these things will I give ...”

“... when it enters the public domain. Welcome as the so-called ‘unexpurgated’ Sons and Lovers may be, it is objectionable that by going to such lengths to establish a new copyright Cambridge University Press should lock up the text for another 50 years. Ideally Lawrence’s novel and its surviving manuscript materials should be declared unprotected public ...”

“... like the Casement diaries, or even those jottings about payment to sailors in Paris which Housman may or may not have left among his surviving writings. Leaves of Grass, especially the ‘Calamus’ section, may be as easy to interpret now as The Shropshire Lad, but neither gives us any ...”

“... Vietnam’s future rather than preserve its past. It is quite likely that as a journalist, one may want for sensitivity about intruding on grief; it is possible that as a foreigner in Vietnam, one may intrude on it without knowing it: while Four Hours in My Lai is ostensibly an inquiry into the massacre of up to four ...”

“... into its wealth leaves the field wide open for journalistic speculation. The British people may feel they have a ‘right to be informed’: but that right has been consistently disregarded, and the ‘authentic information’ has been deliberately withheld. Yet it is not only the lack of hard data about the extent of the royal fortune which is ...”