“... sound systems, bright lights and electrical paraphernalia of a Western rock concert. The artists may have worn national costume but the tempo was pure MTV. This was a populist display on the part of the state. President Landsbergis spoke and went early, leaving the music to the huge crowd which kept growing right up to the final firework display. Only during ...”

“... killed by oneself, and the first human social group, the matrilineal coalition or clan. Weird, you may well think. However, do not dismiss these ideas before you hear a bit more. This theory is designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions, and we should at least start to wonder why we find it so strange. For a ...”

“... criticism in all its vertiginous variety lead one to ponder what it is all about and where it may be heading. The book by René Wellek, focused on Central and Eastern European critics, is the penultimate volume of a vast project he began in the Fifties. The two previous volumes dealt respectively with English and American criticism in this same ...”

“... the sixth move, different games start to move along different paths. The difference at this stage may be tiny – a bishop goes one square further – but the game may by that action be tilted towards a very different finale. The position of the pieces on the board after fifty moves is, in some sense, a consequence of what ...”

“... but the activity of remembering and interpreting it – takes on culturally specific meanings, and may come to signify an awareness of experience peculiar to one culture and not to the other, capable of being used by the one to dominate, expropriate and assimilate the other. In the North American context, it has been argued that ‘history’ is an ideological ...”

“... stand against all such laws. It’s not clear that Mantel agrees with him about this. Her opinion may be closer to that of Ralph’s sister Emma, a doctor: devout believers are ‘safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses: their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them from the task of constructing a personal ...”

“... be laid by the heels.’ Kerr’s gloss is: ‘He was still too scared to tell the truth.’ Freud may have felt disquieted by this talk of ‘filth’ and ‘the devil’, and the lapse it might intimate into (Kerr’s expression) ‘the old religion bug’, but replied promptly with the bland generalisation that ‘to be slandered and scorched by the love ...”

“... frame; I think it’s that the angle and the narrow shadows suggest that the circle of the stadium may never close, that this part may belong to no whole, that this is a geometrical design that could go on for ever, like a staircase in Borges or Piranesi. There is a similar suggestion even in Modotti’s openly political ...”

“... present us with nearly irrefragable apologias, which also engage our sympathies. Characters may be put down, in argument or otherwise, but never suffer irreversible defeat or humiliation. By origin, tragedy – and probably comedy also – is a form based on ritual sacrifice and cruelty, and the oddity – maybe even sometimes the weakness – of ...”

“... entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence. Had Rupert Murdoch called ...”

“... taken by Baxandall to indicate panelling must in fact have indicated pilasters (the base mouldings may be discerned above the lady’s hand in the colour plate of a detail of the painting which serves as the dust-jacket). That these pilasters were more evident once is suggested by Filloeul’s engraving, which he reproduces (although he only refers to it in ...”

“... Until her mother meets her in her mouth again        and makes use of what I could not And may appear on my plate next year in a             castrated form as a rasher; until, via a reference to the role of pigs in the Eleusinian mysteries, the transition is made to the visionary:              In the butcher’s window The ...”

“... particularly in their treatment of quantum theory, where readers without some previous knowledge may lose the thread; certainly I did. But anyone prepared to make a serious effort will get some insight into what is happening. In this review, I aim to do three things. First, I will explain the new thermodynamics; here I will try to follow the ...”

“... without a dozen hitmen (book, TV, theatre) pumping lead into his vital parts. Charles Charming may have been the most exposed poem in history, but it may also turn out to have been the most comprehensively reviled (the Sunday Times went so far as to dub it ‘The Worst Poem of the Twentieth Century’). Thus, even in ...”

“... that they had not been ripped open like pigs.’ The reappearance of the porky metaphor may indicate a family habit of speech, since Edwin Tennyson d’Eyncourt wrote of his cousin: ‘What a hog that Alfred is, and what can you expect from a pig but a grunt.’ Tennyson was 12 when he wrote the first letter in this volume, which closes with his ...”