“... on the reappearance of Allon’s brief autobiography, to memorialise him in this column, though it may not be quite appropriate for me to do so. I came to know him only when he was already ill. One evening early in 1986, shortly after I arrived at Sussex, I found myself sitting next to him in a Brighton restaurant; on his other side was Alan Sinfield, and they ...”

“... the US Department of Energy concluded they had failed to calibrate all their cells correctly and may have overestimated the amount of heat really produced. Strangely, whenever the committee was around, the cells failed to produce heat. ‘In none of our visits to the different sites did we see an operating cell that was claimed to be producing excess heat at ...”

“... about 1.5 per cent will be reached by the end of 1991, with the 2 per cent line being reached in May-June 1992. The implication is that in the months remaining before that date South Africa really ought to be the subject of a saturation TV, radio, poster and leaflet campaign: of this there is no sign. The Government has allotted the princely sum of £300,000 ...”

“... it. ‘Two,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget, you are dying a bit every day as well. Your plateau may last a bit longer than mine. But you still sink a sizeable notch or so every decade. Soon, you’ll need spectacles. You won’t stand when you can sit. You’ll stop being able to hear what people say at parties. You’re hobnailing your liver, sooting up ...”

“... May 20 is marked each year in Indonesia as the Day of National Awakening. It commemorates the founding in 1908 of Budi Utomo, a nationalist organisation created by Javanese in their late teens and early twenties at the Western-type medical school in Batavia, colonial capital of the Netherlands Indies. These founders were drawn from a tiny protoélite, numbering just over a thousand, who had been educated at Dutch-language primary schools ...”

“... to weep and for men to swap dirty jokes, the gender reversals in the case of Muskie’s family may have intensified the impression of the Senator’s vulnerability. ‘I think Senator Muskie’s excited performance again indicates he’s not the man that many of us would want to have his finger on the nuclear button,’ Loeb said at the time. But Loeb ...”

“... with the region, some regard for it seems obligatory for American citizens. However ill it may sound when proceeding from the lips of George Bush, internationalism has a clear advantage in rhetoric and principle over the language of America First. The irony has been that, in order to make their respective cases, both factions have had to exaggerate the ...”

“... class ...’ There are photographs to reinforce such visual impressions. Here and there readers may come on some puzzling terms. They will only gradually discover that a ‘lazybed’ is a trench for planting potatoes in. Agon is a good Greek word, but scarcely an English one. Before 1745 the Highlands and Islands were a little world of their own, a ...”

“... Catholic-Stalinist-Fascist-Pacifist intellectuals is one of them. While what he says about them may be ‘true’, it is just that in the wider scheme of things they were not worth all that truth-telling. Orwell, of course, also had much bigger targets in his sights, and he often hit them right in the middle, but it is nonetheless the case that much of his ...”

“... and painting have over the centuries owed much to Continental models and practitioners, which may explain why they have ranked as subordinate arts. In literature it is the other way round. We have never absorbed Goethe, Racine or Dante as others have absorbed Shakespeare. Indeed, not the least embarrassing feature of a visit to the Continent is the ...”

“... its own walls. That is to say, its own structure is objectively the same as the universal. It may be conscious of this in different degrees. But it has no immediate access to universality, it does not look at it, as it were.’ Elsewhere, he claimed that works of art don’t exist in parallel to the world ‘outside’, but both remain subject to society ...”

“... b c c d e f (the a d e and f will find pairings in the sestet). One’s uncertainly about meaning may be less important than the conviction that there is one, a conviction which springs, paradoxically, from the poet’s difficulty in taking hold of it. The language is alive, active; and it is in that sense of action, more than in ‘meaning’, that verbal ...”

“... Max (now Lord) Beloff after Harold Laski’s death in 1950, ‘that ... the future historian may talk of the period between 1920 and 1950 as the “The Age of Laski.”’ Thirty-seven years later a leading historian of the Labour Party observed that ‘Laski’s time and reputation have gone into almost total eclipse.’ How did a thinker, writer and ...”

“... lectures in philosophy. McKitterick, who reproduces the single extant sheet, suggests that it may not even have been completed. But the enterprise continued and Thomas went on to publish William Temple’s edition of Ramus’s Dialectica, Georg Sabinus’s commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and English and Continental theologians. His intellectual ...”

“... old friends and (last year’s useful word) old frenemies – people you don’t like but may someday need. The conference attracts literary scholars from all over the world. Sipping espresso at an outdoor café, I met a Swiss critic of contemporary French fiction, on his first trip to the United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly ...”