“... Sutherland teaches psychology at the University of Sussex, but his early career as a journalist may have sensitised him to human irrationality. Thus he begins his tour of the psychological literature on irrationality with a discussion of the so-called ‘availability error’, a phenomenon particularly widespread in the media. This disposition, first ...”

“... that her relation with her mother must be recovered, even if the recovery proves fatal. Helen may say that she was the love of Bett’s life, but it is quite clear that Bett is the great love of Helen’s life. This is disconcerting, even for a woman reader. We are all used to thinking of a woman obsessing over a male lover, or perhaps even over a ...”

“... Forster, whom F.R. Leavis accused of ‘not knowing how serious he was’. And our trouble today may be that because we take seriousness seriously we take Bloomsbury too seriously. Virginia Woolf has become an icon, academically hagiographic. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, is out because he is not in our sense a serious writer – deliberately not, one ...”

“... to show the building in oblique perspective. Time and weather are acknowledged – the building may even be in ruins. You do not understand the building so much as imagine what it would be like to stand in one particular place – the perspectivist’s station-point – at one particular time of day. High Modernism, like Palladianism, was in love with the ...”

“... They have no duty towards a President who has not chosen and cannot remove them. Their motives may be a comfortable life ‘enjoying the great Babylonian hotels’ or else the satisfaction of work well done. They do not see themselves changing the course of history, and need not worry about survival in an election. Roy Jenkins prefaces his European Diary ...”

“... hideous farming practices and carcinogenic substances, and so in one way her fall from office may be deplored. Just as much to be deplored, however, is her dream Britain with its population of lean deluded prigs, an Erewhon society where the sick are punished. Time may show that it was, indeed, all a practical joke, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for Bradford’.17 May. Sitting outside a café in Regent’s Park Road, A. and I see a transvestite striding up the street with a mane of henna’d hair, short skirt and long skinny legs. It’s the legs that give him/her away, scrawny, unfleshed and too nobbly for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to believe Noe, whose motives in telling the story after Stanley had become famous, he says, ‘may have been mercenary’, although ‘there is no evidence’ that the New York Sun ‘paid him for his revelations’. Not entirely happy with this explanation, however, Bierman tries again: ‘More likely he was motivated by personal animus ... the mere fact ...”