“... for ‘an overemphasis on the oral component ... and a comparative neglect of the history’. He may have in mind here the formal origins of oral history in the US, where the life-stories of significant citizens were collected in a Columbia University project from the Forties onwards. For Evans, these public figures did not embody ‘the mythical and ...”

“... it used to be. Perhaps more important, it makes it feel safer to collect as an investment – this may be something for which Wilson was responsible. The danger lies in the information available on the work of art’s recent history. At the sale of a single collection the recent history of the objects is perfectly clear, but in other sales it tends to be ...”

“... servants, poor whites and planters looked down on the ‘natives’ and up to the bigwigs. It may be that Duras was raped when she was four; in any case, sex came into her life early on and it was a nasty business, although Adler refrains from any obvious psychoanalytical interpretations. From Cambodia the family moved to Cochin China, surviving on Mme ...”

“... effect on academic libraries in the US. If their research programmes are very ambitious, they may have to divert up to 50 per cent of their acquisitions budget to buying Elsevier’s products. Humanities subjects suffer correspondingly from frozen or reduced budgets, those twin toads of academic life. The argument is that students of the humanities can ...”

“... Still less were they expected to do them. That such flaunting outrageousness might become a trap may not immediately have been apparent. The conventional media have always celebrated Greer the phenomenon. It saves them from having to weigh and sift her ideas. The coverage of this new book, explicitly billed as a sequel to The Female Eunuch, has been wide and ...”

“... light on the mystery of human existence. Bede wrote this a hundred years after the event and it may reflect his wishful thinking. Even if it does, the story conveys an ideal of how conversion should happen. From the whole array of accounts it is clear that the missionaries were first and foremost preachers – the Lives say this expressly of at least a ...”

“... James Fox, who was contesting Westminster in the September General Election and whose mistress she may, or may not, at some point have been. Although she was there for only a short time, many were shocked by her boldness. At the Westminster by-election two years later, caused by Fox having become Foreign Secretary in the ...”

“... of the three caskets. Like Portia, or indeed like Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, Ellen may neither choose whom she would, nor refuse whom she dislikes. In a double entrapment, she is caught between the suitor who conforms to her father’s wishes and the stranger who stirs her innermost longings. As Mr Cave’s ‘industrial advance’ seems to ...”

“... dotted around Macedonia, but you are not allowed to say that during a war like this, where it may be that bad things are being done on both sides, just as you are not allowed to doubt atrocity. It’s as if Nato and its entourage were trying to make up for the witlessness of the past: trying to show that whatever we do, we won’t be turning a blind ...”

“... never go to those trendy plays in small off-off-Broadway theatres where God knows what indignities may be visited on the audience in pursuit of its edification or entertainment. If I’m forced to go to one, I sit in the middle of a row in the middle of the house, where peripatetic actors can’t get at me. ‘What have I got to lose?’ My nerve, for ...”

“... a woman could put on without assistance. This discrepancy between women’s experience and men’s may be one reason why dress has come to be seen as a predominantly female subject, or at least one that is expressed in female terms. It is common enough to find books which purport to be about some universal aspect of human experience but turn out, on closer ...”

“... since he does not end up sacrificing Isaac, we have no way of knowing whether he was going to: it may be that he was responding with a challenge of his own that made God back away from the absurdity of his demand. The rabbis and Church Fathers may have interpreted Abraham’s behaviour as the perfect obedience to the deity ...”

“... and his stupidity, glimpsing a mind that moves with ‘force’ but not ‘clarity’. Ira may be a courageous idealist, but he is also a thug. As Nathan hears him rant senselessly about the Korean War, and berate his Negro maid for her loyalty to Harry Truman’s Democratic Party, he becomes disgusted, and after a while, ‘profoundly bored’. For ...”

“... it seems to me a very savvy statement, at any rate for people who write. For a real writer, it may well be that writing and thought are indivisible, and that the only pure thinking writers do is when they are actually writing. This may be why, when not writing, I seem to be, if not in space, if not I hope spacey, at any ...”

“... work. For example, in order to plough a large area a tractor-driver ploughs shallowly. Milkmaids may reach their amazing targets in terms of volume but may produce dirty milk which has gone sour. This is also true at the level of the farm, where quantity is more important than quality. Most damaging of all, this ...”