“... and black-clad, smoking cigarettes as they cluster in the dark S&M club of your body’, which may look like a hip and brave and humorous way of putting it, but actually is quite odd. Sinister, black-clad, cigarette-smoking? How can a woman writer in late 20th-century Manhattan be so narrow-minded and square? As Bank’s stories carry Jane Rosenal across ...”

“... Lumumba’s house, wanting to talk to her about ‘us’ as a massive riot is about to start, may seem like a good way of dramatising the gulf between the personal and the political, but all we feel is the lamentable poorness of his timing (a similarly adolescent solipsism creeps into many of his pronouncements on Inès). Equally, we immediately identify ...”

“... to a splendid theme. The book has already won applause; it will surely be widely read; and it may well establish itself as a classic of literary criticism. Yet I confess that in reading it I was more often irked than thrilled. It would be petty to insist on the occasional shortcomings in scholarship. There certainly are a few odd slips. Aristophanes of ...”

“... himself with the British ruling caste that he also hated. But he turned out to have been right. It may be, too, that he understood that not all journalists are crusaders, but that even in the ‘higher’ reaches of the profession there are plenty who enjoy the frisson of betraying colleagues to further themselves, the shiver which accompanies writing copy ...”

“... on to speak of the ‘tough habits of mind of an active, penetrating thinker’ that the reader may begin to dissent. For ‘tough’, in any serious sense, Waugh was not; the impression is rather of a weak and wounded personality trying to outstare the world, to make up by the emphasis of his talk for what he lacks in inner coherence. No doubt the best ...”

“... they suspected he would dearly like to hear: moreover, as Mendel was an abbé, his assistants may have felt that there was an element of heresy in securing results other than those the Reverend Father was convinced were true. This is a subject on which the authors of the present book write amusingly. I do not suppose that personal advancement is a ...”

“... people. For Punch readers it is assumed that Scotland is already pretty familiar, and the stories may have a punch-line. The Encounter stories are more allusive, elliptical, up-market. The first two stories concern illegitimate bairns. One is called ‘South America’: a Scottish engineer goes to that continent, leaving his wife with two children, and seems ...”

“... does not lie there but in birdwatching. In Buchan’s novels there is a nice variant, which we may call the principle of ‘not being really there’ (it recalls T. E. Lawrence to us). Buchan’s heroes tend to be in continual transit between the extremities of the Empire and, faced though you may be with them in a ...”

“... of death. Because they are recognisably his themes, one is somehow reassured by them – which may be false comfort, for it’s not the same as understanding them. Here is a lone, elderly woman, soon to die but surviving for the time being in a cabin or hovel in a patch of stones. Sometimes she visits a nearby tomb, and comes under the scrutiny of 12 ...”

“... of the ‘centre-right’ move into the new party’s positions of influence and power, there may be trouble in the future. One cannot at the same time praise the Liberals’ achievements in community politics (as many Social Democrats are quite properly doing) and work to fortify in positions of local power those same long-established office-holders whom ...”

“... romantic world is the creation of absolute fact, so far as language and poetry can make it, which may be the world of enchanted castles and maidens as well as that of minnows and billiard-balls, of lime-trees and water-snakes and an evening sky, ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow green’. But the other world is not a world at all: it is the ‘description ...”

“... overemphasis on the importance of these discoveries. At several points it is hinted that they may be compared to the analysis of DNA. These are indeed the oldest fairly complete near-human remains, and Johanson and his colleagues are to be congratulated on finding them. They have worked hard in giving descriptions. But these bones do not reveal any new ...”

“... It is admittedly a small one, but a damaging point for MacCabe’s argument about Eliot and Joyce may seem to ensue from it. In Dubliners, Joyce would never have permitted himself a fuzziness about an utterance of the ‘have his say’/‘hev my say’ type. In this sense, his practice is closer than George Eliot’s to that which MacCabe calls ‘classic ...”

“... In this sense, the dangers for Twelver Shiism that Kedourie sees in Khomaini’s position may be more apparent than real. Another danger much spoken of by Western commentators is that of the imminent fragmentation of Iran. This prediction owes a great deal to the interpretation of late 19th and early 20th-century Iranian society by Ervand ...”

“... universal traits and in his compulsive descriptions of poor Jews seen in Vienna in his adolescence may be detected the fear of the unrespectable classes felt by those who are immediately threatened by them. Here, too, there is a rational starting-point. The great barrier to the historical study of irrationality is the initial refusal to accept that rationality ...”