“... At the very start of this brief fiction the author blazons the name of his heroine – Clara Velde – like a declaration of intent. Bellow always opens bravely, plunging his readers into the midst of things, and if the bravery sometimes strikes us as mere bravado (as for example, with Augie March’s ‘I am an American ...’), the headlong stride of the style, its weight and energy, sweep us forward unresisting ...”

“... Like Diogenes in his tub, Roger Scruton has stripped himself of his professorship of aesthetics to rail, ungowned, against the age in which fate has deposited him. Scruton’s opposition to the times has two current manifestations: one is his lyrical advocacy of the feudal harmonies of the fox-hunt; the other is his hatred of ‘yoof’ culture. In An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture* he defines culture three ways ...”

“... Science policy’ is not quite a contradiction in terms but it contains within itself a dialectical opposition between careful planning and the exploitation of opportunity. One might describe it as a strategy for groping around an unfamiliar blacked-out room. On the one hand, the results of research cannot be foreseen: if that were possible, then the research would not be worth doing ...”

“... British social history, for so long in protracted adolescence, seems finally to have come of age. The work of two generations of researchers, led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry ...”

“... Name the greatest Russian physicist of this century. The public vote would go for Andrei Sakharov – but for moral stature rather than for contributions to knowledge. A generation ago, Pyotr Kapitza would have been supported by many, in the mistaken belief that he was the master mind behind the Russian Bomb. Among physicists, however, Ley Davidovitch Landau would stand preeminent ...”

“... A family listening as their father reads them the Bible; a philosopher poring over a book; an artist, who turns his back on us as he draws; a secretary absorbed in taking dictation, and another absorbed instead in listening to the figure who dictates; a sleeping hermit. These figures, all of them represented in paintings exhibited in the Paris Salons of the 1750s, all share the same oubli de soi, are all engaged in ‘absorptive’ states which create the fiction that we, the spectators, are not there: in forgetting themselves, they forget us too ...”

“... Sherry Turkle has written a reasonable, useful and heroically neutral book on the Lacan phenomenon: the sudden celebrity in France as maître à penser of Jacques Lacan, an elderly psychoanalyst whose writings are of a unique, some would say repellent difficulty. Venerated on the one side as the foremost agent of ideological subversion, reviled on the other as an intolerable, conceited obscurantist, Lacan is a living symbol of division between opposed temperaments, parties and generations ...”

“... Is there or is there not good reason to believe that the experience of being alive is still on the whole improving for the majority of human beings? And if there is, is there good reason to expect this improvement to persist into the reasonably near, the imaginatively accessible, future? The idea of progress involves the adoption of at least two very different perspectives ...”

“... How and why do some writers’ characters live from the word go? It may not be necessary that they should; it may not even be to the writer’s purpose and advantage. Shakespeare’s minor characters often have a life which the drama as such has no real use for and no way to deal with. And yet Hamlet would never have become the universally significant figure that he has if he were not immediately and locally real to the audience as he stands in black in the king’s presence chamber ...”

“... A computer is a tool, working the intentions of its designer or user. It is no more malevolent than the village clock whose chimes wake us in the night, or the car whose failed brakes run us down. We invest it with personality because it is an instrument of the mind, rather than of the hand. It extends and mimics the very function that has always seemed to distinguish us biologically from other organisms – the capacity to reason ...”

“... If a speaker at one of his seminars began to explain how he had come by his ideas, the great Russian theoretical physicist L.D. Landau would stop him with disdain: ‘That is only an item for your autobiography.’ Landau died before reaching the age of reminiscence, but Rudolph Peierls was his friend and Nevill Mott was another near-contemporary. Now that they are both about eighty, they may feel able to risk his posthumous scorn ...”

“... In his history of the genre, Brian Aldiss suggests that most SF is what he calls ‘prodromic’: we must read it less as a prophecy of the future than as symptomatic of the present. By this rule 1984 will be 36 years out of date when we get there. A commoner view (on which Aldiss is naturally not so keen) holds that SF, like the Western, is an exclusively American line of fiction in which dabbling Europeans can easily make fools of themselves ...”

“... Let us suppose that Russia is no less a democratic state than any usually referred to in this way; let us, that is, overlook the fact that its democratic periods resemble the tiny windows set in the wall of a Russian church; and with this excised from our minds, let us consider the past year. A new government takes over, with a clearly defined economic team headed by Yegor Gaidar, a son and grandson of famous and privileged Communists, an academic said to be the star of his generation, a former senior editor of Kommunist, the CP’s main theoretical journal, and of Pravda, the Party’s daily paper ...”

“... In a slight but revealing sketch, written well after his Soldiers Three tales and never published in his collected works, the soldiers Kipling invented are imagined discussing their author, and pointing out with tolerant contempt that he has simply got them all wrong. Kipling was well aware of the fact, and no doubt aware, too, that it was precisely because they were so well ‘done’ that Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd – the three contemporary musketeers whose sentiments and background seemed so unflinchingly realistic – were in fact totally bogus ...”

“... The view that things are getting worse seems to be on the increase in Russia. In June, lzvestia published the results of a poll conducted by the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion – said to be the best organisation of its kind – in which 58 per cent of respondents thought that they were better off before Gorbachev came to power; two years ago only 45 per cent believed this ...”