“... eight years after the publication of the Life and 24 years after The Garden and the City, he may be said to have made his major contribution. Rogers’s claim to the succession, if it is a claim, cannot be thought audacious or premature. After more than a century of scholarly neglect, Pope enjoyed considerable attention during the ascendancy of the New ...”

“... of the recurrent reflexiveness in the Brothers’ craft, letting us know that they know that we may fall to imagining that they do not know what they are doing. A repeated example, as if to wake us from this stupor, is Chico’s turning to Groucho with pride, asking: ‘Ats-a some joke, eh Boss?’ Groucho is complimenting Chico not only on countering a ...”

“... fewer friends than you went in with – and forget arranging a date with the initial interrogator.May I then suggest that anyone who still thinks that our treatment of animals is basically in the moral clear, especially in the areas of experimentation and food production, sit down and study Peter Singer’s book: then they can come and tell me why a ...”

“... the force to dislodge him. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose plenum met early in May amid widespread speculation in the Soviet and foreign press that it would vote him out of office, managed 13 votes against him out of a total of more than five hundred. More important, Boris Yeltsin, who has just won in the first round the first ever popular ...”

“... establish the rudiments of a new order was Boris Yeltsin, acting in concert with Gorbachev. They may yet decide to implement the measures of reform they have promised – Mr Yeltsin’s speech of 28 October was the most serious of these promises but, as this is written, it remains only words. After the coup it seemed that Russian power would rush in to fill ...”

“... supported the left-wing Salvador Allende. Huneeus wrote to Gould: ‘Our candidate lost, as you may have learnt in one of your few moments of un-provincialness. Bad anti-climax it was. Everyone expecting the bloody country to occupy the news for ages as the one, first, eccentric, out-of-the-way little place that votes in a Marxist government – and we turn ...”

“... around 10 o’clock we all retire to bed. – I am now bearing up quite well under this regimen: I may even intensify it.That Wagner managed to do any work at all (apart from quelling insubordination) is a miracle. His obsession with water dominates all his operas – Tristan, the Ring, the Dutchman and Parsifal especially – and has to be considered as much ...”

“... If Margaret Thatcher did not feel the same need to subject herself to this particular rule, it may have been because she never made mistakes or because she flinched from a discipline that was external and alien – in a word, foreign. Lawson brings out her persistent reluctance to deploy the interest rate weapon against inflation, despite the fact that her ...”

“... as Politburo minutes of that time, to both of which I had been refused access the previous April. May promises made that autumn have not been kept. The KGB, military and foreign affairs archives remain administratively separate from the other state archives, and access is extremely difficult. And we still await the Presidential of Kremlin archives, promised ...”

“... planning’ on the part of Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, from whose book it comes. Though it may not, at first sight, appear any less plausible than a capitalist China ruled by the Chinese Communist Party would have seemed in the Sixties or Seventies, or a Japan producing high-quality, high-cost consumer goods for the world would have done in the ...”

“... drinking. And the ‘fastness’ was a habit that continued into his adult life. Peirce drank, he may later have used cocaine, he womanised, he could be violent (one of his servants sued him for assault), he was at the least careless, if not actually dishonest with other people’s money. Brent goes so far as to wonder whether he ...”

“... myths. This is not at all to deny that in any given situation thinking about quite other subjects may rub off on the arts. Early Modernism is in part a matter of new technology; the designers of dreadnoughts and flying machines had to do new thinking about ships and vehicles, to get away from the notion that a warship was just any old ship with guns on it, an ...”

“... journals produced in Berlin, Prague and Paris. The general effect, however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound ...”

“... and found it to be at a very low ebb. Perhaps he should have looked a little farther. The water may be receding over the mudflats on his stretch of coast, but round the corner it is flooding strongly. The black tide that Freud was so afraid of in the early years of the century has been making a steady advance. When I was a boy no one knew the signs of the ...”

“... Verse, like coins, mint strictly, precisely, honestly. Follow the rule stubbornly: So that words may be compact, Thoughts – expansive... How then does Mackay Brown go about his new-minting process? In the first place, he uses the opportunities of narrative to return the figurative to the concrete. Scarcely have we had the disquisition on the worn state of ...”