“... Reducing Error and Influencing Behaviour put it last year, Up to 80 per cent of accidents may be attributed, at least in part, to the acts and omissions of people . . . It is quite wrong to believe that telling people to take more care is the answer to these problems. While it is reasonable to expect people to pay attention and take care at ...”

“... Ehud Barak’s landslide victory in the general election of 17 May marked the beginning of a new era in Israeli politics. The election was critical for the future shape of the country’s chronically divided society as well as for its relations with the Arab world. Under the reformed electoral system, each voter casts two ballots – one for the prime minister and one for the parties to be represented in the 120-seat Knesset ...”

“... in the way asserted. Thus Kay Carmichael’s correlation between poverty and mental ill health may mean, as she thinks, that poverty drives people to mental breakdown, but also may mean that people fail to hold down well-paid jobs when their mental health is disturbed. There are instances of the half-statistic: John ...”

“... George recorded. Some, of course, felt the same about Clarence. His intended consort was Princess May of Teck, a royal in a million, who it was hoped would pull him together. On his premature (and extremely fortunate) demise, she married Prince George instead. The rest of his life was a succession of such fantasy worlds. Both Alexandra and her daughter ...”

“... Derrida says about language sounds pretty much like what the Philosophical Investigations said, we may conclude that in France they are just now catching up with what we learned as students. We were raised to sneer at Hegelian absolute knowledge, Marxist certainty about the direction of history, Husserlian apodicticity, Russellian logical form, positivist ...”

“... passive and affectionate, inspired by curiosity, wonder and love – rarely by hate. She may be likened, at least in this respect, to the Whitman who chronicles the incubating self nurtured by the sensuous world: There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object ...”

“... is a way of abdicating from the inexpressible mode of being that it also sustains. The clarity may be illusory, but the Romantic dawn and the Age of Reason unite to give it a great and naive confidence, so that the reader feels it is trembling on the verge of some great revelation, some breakthrough about the state of the universe and man’s nature. As ...”

“... of living speech where Walcott employs a refined poetic diction. He is also, as some of this may imply, less pleasurable to read. Sun Poem is nothing if not structured. It has 12 sections, suggestive of an annual cycle, or of the hours between sunrise and dark; seven of these sections correspond to the colours of the rainbow, though in puns that have ...”

“... the bourgeoisie into buildings that house a wide range of books, among which some literature may be lurking, the public libraries must surely have made matters a little easier, if only from a logistical point of view, for those members of the middle class who are in rebellion against the philistinism endemic in their milieu. The incorrect belief that the ...”

“... applied specifically to (young) women’; and – most surprising of the entries that may variously be held to manifest sexism or a reversed sexism or the defeat of sexism – that ‘He who hesitates is lost’ in its early uses referred ‘specifically to women’. Again like any good reference book, this dictionary is ideal for family ...”

“... of that enterprise need not invalidate the work: like a climber or a contemplative, the maker may come to think that the only way of fully understanding what he is doing is to have done it. Irwin says of his work in the early Sixties: ‘With those late line paintings the process was intimate with the solution. I sometimes wonder whether anyone in the ...”

“... wasn’t some kind of neurotic who could be expected to crack up in difficult circumstances? She may have been rich but she wasn’t laid back. Her mother was strict, a ‘Southern lady of the old school’, and the girls (five of them) didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or ‘go out anywhere’ in jeans. Her father taught her how to use a gun. She trusted ...”

“... liberal. That makes the conduct of Burke (and Esther) no less courageous. They had much to lose. I may appear a little unkind in stressing this. After all, the Burke whom I know in this way as a simple ethnic heritage is one Mr Freeman has painfully to learn, with all the more difficulty in that Burke often passes for white so easily. Unhappily, Mr Freeman has ...”

“... murderer, Mr Wrong, are sorted out. There’s an Incident at Owl Creek-like ending in which Mary may be executed, or reborn, or returned by time-loop to the novel’s opening situation. Other People, this is to say, does not easily give up its secret – at least not to me. Amis’s cleverness has always been of the kind which makes the clodhopping reader ...”

“... with his own image. Françoise Gilot said she couldn’t go on living with a monument, but that may have been sour grapes. No doubt he was passionately concerned with himself, but he was even more concerned with the things he made. And not with those he had made, but with whatever he happened to be working on at the time. He kept the ‘Demoiselles ...”