“... and the elderly, Europe’s diversity is at its greatest.’ His severity in this field may put him most at odds with his potential electors for the presidency. Eleven out of 12 EU members, he reports – guess the odd one out – are seeking social compacts with their trade unions, and there is a powerful dynamic behind the move to make these ...”

“... and shape another life – a night life, this time? And who knows when or how this new union may dissolve, as Destiny decides? At least as early as the middle of the ninth century, a cycle entitled The Book of the Tale of the Thousand Nights was apparently put together and written down in Arabic. In their nearly thousand-and-one-year journey to our ...”

“... source of anxiety: possibly she will be delivered to work by one of the men in her family, or she may wait, veiled, in the Ladies’ section of a bus shelter, and then board the Ladies’ section of the bus. Women are not educated for their own profit or gratification: there is simply a widespread belief that schooling makes one a better mother. The Saudis ...”

“... chapter on the newspaper Libération, started in 1973 to be the ‘voice’ of the generation of May ’68, but no fuller analysis of the modern French press or of its literary connections. To get any sense of the modern literary marketplace we have to wait indeed for the New History’s brutally downputting last chapter, by Stephen Heath, who picks on ...”

“... the Labour Party do their work for them.’ This analysis led him to a startling prediction. On 11 May 1975, he wrote: ‘A coalition has been born without being formally declared: it is broadly the Tories and Liberals throwing their weight behind Callaghan, I think. They won’t touch Wilson. They’ll get rid of him just as they got rid of Heath ... I ...”

“... accreditation. Within weeks of the break-up, she was covering the Battle of the Bulge and by May 1945 she had written one of her finest reports – on Dachau. She would mull over the question of Nazi atrocities in two more reports, one from Nuremberg in 1946 and another, published here, on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, 16 years later. Spare and ...”

“... the technical advances achieved by Wagner’s use of recurring motives in a dramatic context, and may thus even have assisted Wagner in the formulation of his mature musical style. Liszt himself, though he toyed with many operatic projects during the early 1850s, never managed to find the literary stimulus to react creatively to the challenge of musical ...”

“... to understand ‘that a defence against the maleficent power of the image, which seduces the eye, may be found in the acoustic sign, which alerts the ear.’ He falls in love with the voice of the great Egyptian singer Oum Kalsoum, and, moving on to the more impersonal abstraction of the written sign, takes up calligraphy under the guidance of a ...”

“... and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to ...”

“... research into the origins of life and the universe, nor with theories of randomness which may bring scientists at some stage to some form of religion, but with the generally shared view of science as the continuing process of objective inquiry, discovery and invention called progress which, for many people, has replaced religion. For they believe that ...”

“... and engrossing, illuminating some dark corners of 19th-century visual culture. Still, readers may end up feeling less than fully persuaded, and doubtful in particular whether Gotlieb’s arguments justify our writing off the old ‘emancipatory narrative’ that relied (as he puts it) on a ‘seemingly Romantic but in fact vague and hackneyed vocabulary ...”

“... the homosexual sub-culture who is drifting into the orbit of Nazism. Perhaps, Paul muses, Joachim may be partly to blame for the patronising way he has treated the boys he picks up. In paying for the favours of Heinrich, Joachim has ‘subsidised the mirror image of his darkest self’ – his ‘wicked, sensual, animal existence’. Perhaps he drove Heinrich ...”

“... school, and a reminder that there are many kinds of structuralism, and that non-literary types may also have something to say about the Bible. So much for the positive thesis. Whatever else the Bible is, it is literature; and a literary reading of it can be attempted. For many readers, the Guide will, as promised on the jacket, ‘unlock the door to the ...”

“... like a giant cheese out of the primordial ooze was not articulating a common creed, though he may, as Ginzburg claims, enable us to glimpse a widespread peasant materialism; the cunning French impostor who insinuated himself into the identity, the household and the marriage of another was not enacting a characteristic regional practice, though he ...”

“... the main protagonists in the Angolan war – Angola, Cuba, South Africa and the United States – may just bring about a settlement. Yet peace remains a plausible outcome at best. South Africa has committed its forces to regular combat in Angola for thirteen years. In so doing, it has sought primarily to restrict the activities of exiled Namibian guerrillas ...”