“... history. It came up with a novel but plausible insight about our ancestors. Laqueur’s argument may not stand the test of time: it was more than tinged with political prejudice about parental choice in education (and in this Thatcherite bias one may detect the first signs of a fatal liking for intellectual glitz rather ...”

“... a touch Albanian, one modest academic salary devoted to the study of Manchu or classical Mongol may seem an outrageous expense when set against the need for more debt collectors and dole office clerks, and I would admit that there is a strong case for funding scholarship in the Pelliot and Ratchnevsky tradition only on a European Community-wide basis. Even ...”

“... Just after 8 o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 24 May 1989, a special unit of gendarmes entered the priory of Saint François at Nice in search of a certain Paul Touvier, who was living there under the name of Paul Lacroix. An arrest was made and within half an hour Touvier was on his way to Fresnes prison in Paris ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and wisecracks; you slap your thighs, he is suddenly vulnerably sensitive and very cultivated. May Week was in June, the last instalment of his on-off autobiography, discloses that for years he has been laboriously studying Japanese in a spirit of anything but racist superiority. The volume ends with a carpe diem in James’s hyper-sensitive mode. The ...”

“... of the circle, the Regal Cinema, High Street, Sidcup, Kent. It was either late April or early May 1945. I was not yet eight years old. Ten years later in Wuppertal, on the fringe of the Ruhr, the German boy with whose family I was staying for the summer said in response to a remark of mine about the catastrophe Hitler had been for Germany: ‘Well, at ...”

“... has moved into the vanguard of theoretical physics. He is one of a handful of people whose work may form the foundation of a ‘theory of everything’, a description of nature so fundamental yet so all-encompassing that it would be able to account for all the phenomena of the natural world. Scientists who know Hawking and work with him tend to protest that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if its emergence must have a direct biological rationale. It might, on the contrary, odd as this may sound, be simply a by-product of traits that do have such a rationale. One of the great puzzles of evolution is why sentience seems to be the preferred method for handling adaptivity to the environment. Why not process information without any inner feeling at ...”

“... somehow guaranteed the novel’s quality, making Ondaatje into a kind of modern Flaubert. But it may be that Ondaatje has spent too long considering what he has written, listened to himself so often that he has occasionally lost a sense of what he is sounding like. Would Flaubert, at any rate, have written the phrase ‘turn eternal in a prayer’ or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... potential opponents of the regime, though the excessive number of graduates in religious studies may spell future trouble. There are many Saudis, with experience of the wider world, who yet value the conventions, restraint and discipline, made sweeter of course by the luxuries of Saudi living. This no doubt is one of the reasons that the rule of the House of ...”

“... probably says something about either the American legal system or the American media, though it may just stem from the fact that 80 per cent of the privately educated college students in the Baby Boom generation almost went to law school. (The other 20 per cent did go to law school.)Lawyer jokes aside (as a category of American humour, they take up a file ...”

“... 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 ...”