“... these first and then turn to the biography’s particular merits. Before going further, it may be helpful if I make clear my own starting-point – that of someone who is neither a Lorca expert, a biographer nor a literary critic. My concern, as a historian and writer, has for long been with the interaction of the social and the subjective. Bear this ...”

“... to 50 per cent’ in strategic weapons were contemptuously rejected. These anti-disarmament groups may well be prepared to engage in negotiations, but with the purpose of securing military benefits for their country. All those who think disarmament is desirable think it would be good if multilateral reductions could be negotiated, agreed, implemented and ...”

“... are narrated in the third person, others by one or another of the characters – a technique which may at first seem unnecessarily elaborate or insufficiently exploited, but in time comes to seem right, a gesture of respect for even small differences in perception. Miss Erdrich is as shrewd about complex long-term human bonds in The Beet Queen as she was in ...”

“... his ambiguous relation to the old order and blamed for the killing in the Reef, no matter how it may have started. This makes him a dangerous man for Mandela to talk to. Buthelezi is the enemy: but Mandela has already made crucial concessions to ‘the enemy’ – a different one but the two are quickly conflated – above all, by suspending the armed ...”

“... compensate. Some readers, who harbour quite similar feelings about the present prime minister, may be surprised by the closing chapters of this book, in which she emerges as on the whole an admirable figure with some venial shortcomings, such as a lack of concern for the arts. She was, we gather, much needed. Britain was, in 1979, even more evidently in ...”

“... but Duranty’s escapades, which inspire such censure from the author, seem rather tame today, and may have seemed so in the roaring Twenties. Taylor is hard on Duranty, and it can sometimes seem as if he had practically no redeeming features. He was, we are told, a leech on his friends, a disloyal colleague and an unfaithful husband. He is described as ...”

“... was confidence and the expectation of further enrichment, whatever shortcomings there may have been in fact in the distribution of wealth and levels of deprivation in town and country. After it, all was despair and the assumption that, in the natural order of things, Scotland would always need special care and attention.’ Pessimistic though this ...”

“... of his eyes/ was totally written-off,/ he was harnessed to a retinagraph’, ‘So that, though it may seem somewhat improbable,/ all that follows/ flickers and flows/ from the back of his right eyeball.’ What takes the reader through the poem is pleasure and puzzlement in roughly equal measure. Whatever Muldoon is, he isn’t the maths master type of ...”

“... these statements has been a great source of strength to Pritchett. The valet who does the living may have particular sympathies, the writer stays detached. He began a long love-affair with Spain in his early twenties and in the Civil War made speeches on behalf of the Republicans, but he never wrote anything resembling a propagandist story. And if some of ...”

“... Old Testament disappeared under the powerful illumination of figurative reading. Modern readers may regard it as a historical curiosity that Augustine, reading in this fashion, should have been able, for example, to discover an adumbration of the Church in the first verses of Genesis. In his central use of Psalms, however, he needed no exercise of ingenuity ...”

“... remarked that in doing so they displayed passivity and a lack of readiness to do battle. That may be, but there is a more conspiratorial explanation – and such explanations cannot be dismissed easily in Russia – which is that the authorities were pulling the demonstrators onto the punch. The march reached the White House in mid-afternoon. So swift was ...”

“... there is only a contradiction here if either explanation is regarded as sufficient, whereas both may be necessary. The godfather of the IEA, Antony Fisher, had a genius for picking up economic ideas second-hand and turning in a nice profit by marketing them properly. The theory of economic liberalism was one example. This was cribbed from Hayek and ...”

“... with sufficient closeness. He furthermore suggests that Derrida’s evident lack of understanding may be traced to one of the few traits that his style of deconstruction has in common with A.J. Ayer’s brand of logical positivism: an irresistible urge to devalue the felicity of ordinary speech, one source for Cavell of his proper ‘voice’. This matter of ...”

“... persuasively than the sweeping Continental presence some of us grew up with. The Bishop of Kiev may be the only prelate Tóibín met who has neither congregation nor power, but modern Catholic countries have often lost the faith, and operate versions of belief and practice that are increasingly their own. Seville is where we catch Spanish ...”

“... contribution is an enormous account of four 18th-century female aristocrats, from which we may draw as many inferences about aristocracy as we can or wish to. The women are Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, the grandson of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. The main story starts with the ...”