“... 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 ...”

“... in photographs and memoirs by friends and eye-witnesses than in his own writings – which may be what Gandhi intended: he declared that after 1920 his life was public property. Biography of Gandhi tends to hagiography, and for such purposes judgments about him have served better than judgments by him. Second, Gandhi, like Socrates, had trained himself ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... protocols and internal military guidelines give much latitude to commanders on the ground. This may make the law appear feeble, sometimes to the point of vacuity, but it is also its realism. Chief among the paradoxes of the law of war is that it cannot be enforced. The moral opprobrium that has surrounded the use of poison gas is an exception that proves ...”

“... to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live through interesting times’): we thank our lucky stars that our time for being young was then and not the Eighties or Nineties, but found – or find – ourselves a little slow to get on with the getting on, hypnotised as we are by the brief period ...”

“... someone’s ascribed to something and suggesting another. If others are not at home either, they may respond and the practice may change, even end. Institutions, whole nation-states, even whole empires, as with the former Soviet Union, can collapse, and can sometimes do so very suddenly. When they do, new authorities will ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her son, the authorYou too, my mother read my rhymes  For love of unforgotten times‘And you may chance to hear once more  The little feet along the floor.’R.L.S.The showdown came when Mrs Auden discovered a ‘suggestive’ poem of Auden’s about Medley, as seen in the school swimming pool. George was assigned to lecture both boys on the proper ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... book is an examination of a fabled corporate culture. As such, its immediate historical precedent may be Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a book with few literary merits which endures as a period piece from a time when ‘bright young men in gray flannel suits rushed around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere’. Wilson’s book, written ...”

“... is one of the strengths of the book, but it comes and goes. When it goes, plots and characters may be blandly pressed in the service of typicality and prescription. Thus in Villette the fact that Lucy gets tired of mending Ginevra’s clothes or watching Polly being dutiful is made to bear a burden beyond its capacity when required to ‘exemplify Lucy’s ...”