“... those girls to pose for him.However, sex is no part of Dame Barbara’s art. In the romances, men may be bad and experienced (‘Someone has to know what they are doing,’ she confided to me over tea), but girls are pure and redeeming. Her novels are light-years from the Brontës’, yet they twinkle merrily at Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre across the ...”

“... the career of H.G. Wells, who ‘remained essentially an Edwardian all his life’, with that of May Sinclair, whose concern with literary form and the representation of consciousness identifies her as a forerunner of Woolf and Richardson. Miller gives an illuminating account of Wells’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), which she quite rightly prefers ...”

“... which are still not in place. All through the rest of 1989 the Scottish police beavered away. In May they found more clues. A group of Palestinian terrorists were arrested in Sweden, among them Abu Talb. Talb’s German flat was raided. It was full of clothing bought in Malta. The forensic evidence showed that the Lockerbie cassette-bomb had been ...”

“... diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares Davidson’s colloquial language with the artificial fancifulness of Georgian verse which, in Eliot’s words, caressed everything it touched, it is easy to understand his reaction. Not all the contributors to the Georgian ...”

“... privatisation of Chile’s pension system as the ‘obligatory model’ for their own. In May, General Barry McCaffrey, chief of the US Army Southern Command (with which, contrary to legend, Pinochet’s relations were not warm), visited the ex-dictator in Santiago, and described him afterwards as ‘a man of historic vision and stature’. Pinochet ...”

“... Race Juive’ (in Mon coeur mis à nu). Is this a dark prophecy? A piece of hysterical lunacy? It may be a sort of ‘joke’, but the vacillating character of Baudelaire’s irony allows us no means of telling. But if the Baudelaire of the 1850s and 1860s is ‘radical’, he is more plausibly seen as belonging, for better or worse, to the tradition of ...”

“... out. She calls Jigsaw, which has to do with her own early life, ‘a biographical novel’; and it may not be a coincidence that the book’s most sympathetic reviewers have been those who seem already to know her life story. ‘Truth,’ one of the characters remarks, ‘is such a feeble excuse for so many things.’ Bedford, always inclined to look down her ...”

“... concerned with the seemingly deep issue Schrödinger discussed. The pioneers of molecular biology may have imported analytical attitudes and techniques from the physical sciences, but they were problem-solvers, working at the laboratory bench to tease out the mechanism of heredity. Perutz, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the ...”

“... in this collection of essays and reports, he takes a rather different line about how events may move. Paradoxically, this is because the ‘Czechoslovakia under Ice’ article is among the earliest items in the book. In 1984, the events of Poland in 1980-81 were closer to mind, with their lesson of how a heavily-armed Communist state structure could be ...”

“... that the student protest consciously played over anniversaries: the death of Zhou Enlai, the May Fourth Movement, the rift with Russia, liberation. Moreover, a geomantic line bisects Beijing, running north to south through the heart of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen, the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and Mao’s body in the mausoleum. It is sacred ...”

“... and Japan all offer ample evidence of the failings of liberal political institutions. Democracy may now be dominant, but it is also deeply compromised in its major heartlands. Our liberal-democratic polities offer low levels of accountability and citizen influence when measured against democratic ideals, rather than against ailing autocracies. Fascism and ...”

“... will have to go to the Grand Larousse to discover what a curious person Gance was. Market research may say that encyclopedias sell better if they appear impartial, and if they help children with their homework, but that is precisely why they have lost their intellectual hold on adults. They would be more influential if they made their tastes and their criteria ...”

“... candidate. Though they knew he had done well in the recent West Birmingham by-election, they may still have had a few qualms when they saw their man in the flesh. A photograph reproduced in Tam Dalyell’s peculiar but highly entertaining memoir of Crossman gives some idea of what he might have looked like. It shows the young Dick seated in the centre of ...”

“... made about the Brontës’ works, was fraudulent; that Emily herself destroyed whatever it was she may have been working on during those mysterious two years – these possibilities Barker dismisses. She argues that Charlotte destroyed it, telling herself that the book’s publication would bring a renewal of the critical abuse that Wuthering Heights had ...”

“... two nations were fighting to decide to which of them ‘the empire of the seas shall belong’, may have overestimated the confidence of both sides, but the even-handedness of his judgment is more persuasive than the English posture of righteous defensiveness. Here as elsewhere Pincus’s decision to base so much of his account of Dutch politics on English ...”