“... all these files contain secret portraits: women or men seen as others see them. These portraits may be the result of years of painstaking, insanely minute watching and eavesdropping by one or several security teams. Almost always, much of their detail comes from informers. Some informers won’t be identifiable. Some ...”

“... Well, he has always been envious of Eliot, and if The Old Man’s Road is no 4 Quartets it may be, in a nasty sort of way, his Ash Wednesday (why should the aged beagle stretch its legs, he yawned, scratching himself with his singing bone) … The poems are probably also the expression of a periodic self-disgust (another instance is the kind of ...”

“... and as large,’ de Madariaga says. She makes conscientiously frequent use of ‘seems’, ‘may’, ‘perhaps’, ‘probably’, ‘almost certainly’, to redeem her speculations. She tends to be coy with details of Ivan’s atrocities; when she does fill in the grisly picture, she is liable to go on to cast doubt on its veracity, because it’s ...”

“... said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a subversive agent, ‘psychologically, sensuously’. The aim is to produce a dislocative effect. ‘I’m suspicious of poetry which can be embraced by people who are interested in ...”

“... which is both the first and the weightiest of the long-term consequences. A single episode may be enough to make clear what this means. In answer to the demand that the proposed law instituting the CPE be withdrawn, the president of the Republic solemnly declared to the nation that he had decided both to promulgate the law and to ask that it not be ...”

“... way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that Michael never quite seemed like a child, that even in his nappies he ‘felt’ old. At little over a year and a half he ...”

“... what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. It may be the stuff of a thousand blighted lives and of dozens of novels, but the hurt and amazement come fresh off the page. You may despise the lesson, but you had better learn it; of his adult self, John Burnside tells ...”

“... philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are better characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that their practical component always interrupts the ...”

“... few great multinational units in which power will be mainly concentrated. Culturally, these units may best be called civilisations: there are distinctively British, American, Russian and Chinese civilisations, none of which stops short at national boundaries in the old sense.’ He was born too soon to resign himself to Britain becoming a meekly obedient ...”

“... and No More Tears shampoo, didn’t even want its own name used in Stayfree advertising. Americans may no longer believe, as they once did, that menstruating women can spoil meat, but they still see menstruation in a generally negative light. In a way, that’s not surprising, since there’s isn’t much research on healthy menstruation in normal women. (The ...”

“... 120 were rounded up in St Petersburg on 5 June, while Degaev was out of town? Between May and September he spent much of his time in Tbilisi, where he met radical officers of the Mingrelian regiment – who were arrested soon after his departure in September. Pipes argues that Degaev became a double agent only after his arrest on 18 December 1882 ...”

“... speaks that way for real when on trial is capable of committing all manner of nastiness? It may be only a short step from putting the boot into the English language when standing in the dock to being sent down for GBH. Lynda Mugglestone might have risked stretching her brief in Talking Proper to touch on dark possibilities of the kind Barthes raised in ...”

“... of Post-Modern criticism which supposes that the values of the 1920s have been annihilated. And it may even be that some of his worst writing, like The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, which he wrote during the short honeymoon with Communism that preceded his arrest, is becoming more interesting than it used to be. To take one example, he lived among the ...”

“... which Darcy’s interrogators put to him in 14 different ways. But Hoyle suspects that the badges may have been prepared against an abortive rebellion planned for 1534, and there is in fact little or no hard evidence of high-level conspiracy in 1536. Of course Hoyle is not uniquely immune from what he calls the disposition of historians to see the past ...”

“... to Basho’s Narrow Roads of Oku: ‘my presumptuous and vague idea is that my introductions may simulate his diary and my papers, his poems’) are a compilation of Hamilton’s scientific publications from the first two-thirds of his career (1964-91). Each article is prefaced by an autobiographical account of its genesis and by other retrospective ...”