“... The President finally decided he couldn’t remember what he had or hadn’t signed. Regan may think he and Reagan shared a relationship to Iran/Contra of amnesia, ignorance and inattention, but Regan was not the President’s fairy godfather who aided the Contras and sold arms to Iran. That figure was Reagan’s ‘national hero’, Lieutenant-Colonel ...”

“... it is because of that attentiveness and the feeling that what is being said or done to him may provoke extra-ordinary and unexpected reactions. No one could move so arbitrarily from tranquillity to dementia, because Cagney was a dancer responding to a melody that he alone heard. Like a sprite or goblin he seemed to be in touch with an occult source of ...”

“... about sound’. That Welles was a self-conscious tyrant was crucial to his achievement. It may also explain his ambivalence towards acolytes and admirers, what Thomson calls his ‘dread of the thing most desired’. ‘I’m a king actor,’ Welles admitted in a late interview, ‘maybe a bad one, but that’s what I am, you see. And I have to play ...”

“... the nakedness of his wife. Genitals must be washed before and after intercourse. And in no case may a young man study religious law during the sexual act. Indeed if there are religious books in the bedroom, they must be carefully covered with two cloths before the woman enters. Sexual intercourse must take place on a bed with mattress, sheet and blanket ...”

“... word-perfect 20th-century Flauberts: Pritchett, Bellow, Updike, Nabokov – that even though there may be notes we don’t like in his writing, there are never false notes. And yet it is too obvious that Mike Hoolihan, however much (at long last) she ‘represents’ the female voice in Amis’s boyish fiction – and she is, curiously, one of the most ...”

“... by conflating it with inventive variants on more traditional forms of fantasy, of the kind we may associate with Hoffmann or Gogol. The man who loses his head has also met the devil an hour or so earlier – a busy day for a man described as being ‘unaccustomed to unusual happenings’. When one of the devil’s assistants says to a young woman that he ...”

“... while more beautiful, is decidedly less representative. The attempt to cope with this deprivation may account for some of the awkwardnesses in the installation. The felicitous parts tend to come in the galleries which consist of a single nine-metre-square module, such as those containing works on paper and the room presenting medium-sized paintings of ...”

“... elsewhere in the city of Atlanta, anxiety is climbing because a loutish black sports-superstar may or may not have date-raped the daughter of another white tycoon. The black city fathers, in an attempt to keep their street cred, propose that Charlie act as a character witness for the sports star, and offer in return to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... forces on the weaker, rather than stronger, link of the Axis first. It is not because Pyongyang may, or may not, have a few rudimentary nuclear weapons, which we could easily take out, but because it can shatter Seoul in a conventional attack that we have to proceed more cautiously in bringing it down. But do you ...”

“... a decade before but had since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it may never have contained more than three thousand active, paid-up members, though many more thousands must have attended a few meetings, even joined it briefly, then hurriedly left or slowly drifted away. In bad times its membership dwindled away to a few ...”

“... in the Notebook on ‘Henry James’s inability to invent good proper names’ – the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times – and certainly suffers from no such inability himself. ‘Drawbridge, a butler’, he writes. ‘Blackhead, a civil servant’. ‘Stringham … Roderick ...”

“... Peggy’s marriage to an unemployed academic: Brown also arranges for a timely inheritance.) Dane may be an expert in psychology, but about the girl he intends to marry he says things like: ‘It’s as if everybody, the world and the flesh and the Whole Family, had been blundering round and setting their feet down as near as they could to a flower. But the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... strategies for development and the environment should help.The winner of the mayoral election on 4 May will be answerable to more voters than any other politician in Western Europe except the President of France. These voters, moreover, are some of the most disenchanted and (until now) disenfranchised people in Britain. Of course, there has been a Government ...”