“... The woman was known as Sister Edith, as she was a ‘lay deaconess’ – whatever that may mean. She was attired in a sort of fancy dress, based on the honoured habit of a nun, and wore an adaptation of a nurse’s bonnet, from which her face, described by my brother Osbert as resembling ‘a badly thumbed, over-ripe tomato’, bulged with a ...”

“... a coffee-table adornment, successor to Igor and Vera Stravinsky and A Stravinsky Scrapbook – may look attractive, but its layout in wide double columns with extensive footnotes compounds the difficulty of reading. After certain page-turns one is confronted by four spacious blocks of print, packed with possibly inconsequential matter, and one’s eye ...”

“... doubtless argue that this vindicates the study of battles and tactics after all. However that may be, it certainly undermines the Prussian example as a panacea for other countries’ ills. It could be argued, in fact, that Prussia’s ‘success’ in the 18th century owed more to keeping out of wars than joining in them. Between 1713 and 1806 she was ...”

“... is not a joyous coupling. Sefton’s mind is not on the job, but on his office door which he fears may be unlocked. His mind slips back to an earlier occasion when he was teaching at the University of Woolloomoolloo in New South Wales. There, in mid-act with another student, Helen Burns (namesake of the saintly pupil in Jane Eyre – Jacobson loves a literary ...”

“... recurrent debts which are never quite cleared appear in the stories. Nevertheless, though the job may be started at a time of financial desperation, the money becomes a small symbol of power among humiliations and powerlessness. The question of pimps comes in here: an area of confusion in the contributors’ stories, partly because a pimp can mean anything ...”

“... a confident pronouncement: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’ Among Americans it is a claim which only a committed utilitarian is likely to wish to dispute. Americans suppose themselves to have many individual rights and, after their respective ideological fashions, take ...”

“... rebuff of all – at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that ...”

“... On 16 May 1940, when the German Army had just overwhelmed Holland, police swooped to arrest 3,000 men born in the Reich but now living in Britain. Some were billeted in the offices of the Tote organisation. Queuing for lunch, one detainee saw an army officer brandishing a revolver at a boy: ‘Are you Jewish?’ the officer asked ...”

“... and is inevitably preoccupied with the next. The peculiar satisfactions of this frenetic regime may hold an appeal even for busy dons, but an editor in aspic is a contradiction in terms. There is plenty worth publishing about Keynes without scraping the bottom of the filing cabinets of the Economic Journal and what we have been given is enough. The ...”

“... the public he professed to abhor: the great mass of the comfortable bourgeoisie. A further paradox may be that we cannot be sure whether this pleased or distressed him. If we take his frequent pronouncements at their face value (always a dangerous thing to do with him), then his artistic life must be accounted a complete failure – in his eyes. When he and ...”

“... little measurable influence on sexual orientation in adulthood. Whatever this proves – and it may only prove that the roots of sexual orientation cannot be uncovered by questionnaires – it does not sustain the assertion the authors go on to make: i.e. that homosexuality may be biologically coded. If becoming gay is ...”

“... Street Station. This terseness could be seen as a mark of embarrassment and I wonder if Feinstein may have felt inhibited by certain pieties. There seems a kind of nihil nisi bonum at work in the novel. Neither family contains a character who is at all sternly dealt with. Cruelty is recorded – old Solomon’s leaving his one faithful child out of his ...”

“... Fields, he comments that the man on whom his character is based is a continent-hopping, devil-may-care Princeton graduate whose six languages include Khmer. ‘I graduated from Emerson College,’ Gray says, ‘and am still wrestling with American.’ What are actors, he wonders, compared to these dazzling ambassadors and foreign correspondents and ...”

“... from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew of the diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales to ...”

“... knew where it came from. But it ran thus: Two model Quakeresses Wearing our stylish dresses You may not know it I may not show it Hiding our face from the golden west. Now that is that sort of acrostic graduate students ought to be cracking. There is a lot more to Martha Jane and Me than rebuilding a vanished world and ...”