“... terms, she remarks archly, ‘that overwhelmingly proclaim their own inadequacy’ – we may have got ourselves into something we are always trying to get out of. Indeed, what she calls the ‘pitfalls of gender assignment’ that Vested Interests is so loosely and lucidly about, make one wonder why it is so difficult to imagine a person now not ...”

“... vivid memory of the common fight against the overwhelming odds of Fascist barbarism. These terms may have become suspect and sentimental, but they will stand. It is sometimes supposed that the Wehrmacht of Hitler’s time was less brutal in its operations than the SS and its understrapping torturers. This was never true in Eastern Europe, and least of all in ...”

“... It may be that only the truly self-absorbed can make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing, inward-bound mammoth of a book, where the author laboriously chronicles and inspects his every moment for changes in the moral and spiritual weather ...”

“... of story here, something just offstage, but once you get the hang of reading him, you realise he may be bluffing, and that you have no way of telling. There may be a secret here, and it may matter. There may be a secret, but one of no importance. Or ...”

“... homo: the concept is rejected both by heterosexuals (unwilling to accept the possibility that they may not be as straight as they think they are) and by homosexuals (outraged by the easy option offered to make them straighter). The very term is semantically ambiguous, vacillating between the original botanical meaning – ‘of two sexes’ or ‘having both ...”

“... on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he studies in Islamic Architecture have an overt function – whether prayer, teaching, interment or pleasure – yet seem to have been built with other, covert aims, as ...”

“... through the pretence of utter indifference to any other possibility. As a gimmick the Modern may fire an arrow backward, but must always shun the convention of consciousness running free in time – being ondulant et divers. This is as true now as it was in the days when the Modern was invented, and practised by novelists like Hemingway or Anthony ...”

“... only versions of the lectures we shall presumably ever get and the mistakes in them the rest of us may put down as a foretaste of the long process of misreading him that lies ahead. Transcribers and editors, too, have a subconscious, so that what we are being given here may be taken as an only slightly hystericised version ...”

“... collection of quotations (though no Calverley, alas), he has one very heartening story which may be true even though it has Lord Dacre for its authority. After the suicide of the anti-smoking fanatic Adolf Hitler, it seems, all the bunker deputies began to light up: ‘now the headmaster had gone and the boys could break the rules. Under the soothing ...”

“... when he was in company and a deep one, a moi profond, for when he was alone, and writing. Letters may be written in solitude, but they are not written by the moi profond, whose arduous excavations of the unconscious and of buried memories are not to be squandered by being put into an envelope and delivered to a friend. It was vital that Proust the socialite ...”

“... Vehicle One, or the ‘electric turkey’ as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in ...”

“... that the vast majority of biologists will not recognise the subject as they practise it. Some may want to add a question mark to his title. Before reviewing the parts of biology he loves, Mayr interposes some philosophical chapters, designed both to bring out the importance of biological examples for understanding science and to defend the ideas of reason ...”

“... national resources? Rodger’s answer, repeated many times, is ‘administration’. This may or may not cut much ice in the world of British universities, where the word ‘administration’ is normally surrounded not by scare-quotes but by an atmosphere of holy awe (though also, in secure surroundings, by ribald ...”

“... admit is that this success was built on Nehru’s internal contradictions. However European they may look to many, his cultural roots, family life and early conditioning, even the charming ambivalence and uncertainties of his political style, were all identifiably Indian and Brahminic. He might have seemed terribly modern or cosmopolitan to his admirers in ...”

“... literal physical appearances (with the possible exception of the Eucharist). Pilgrims at Lourdes may believe the Virgin Mary physically appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, but not many would expect the same thing to happen to them during a visit – unlike, perhaps, the pilgrims at Brauron. If one of us was approached by what appeared to be a god, chances are ...”