“... ways in the biographies. She named her cat George Eliot, and planted references to Louisa May Alcott’s writing desk in her novels. In her correspondence with male friends from the university, Stafford began to create various self-mocking female personae – ‘Bessie Barnstable’ or ‘Florence Nightgown’ – who wrote in an exaggerated jocular ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... which appeared under Mr Major’s name in various newspapers during the campaign – which may be why they read better than some examples of the genre. Nevertheless, these sorts of book are in perpetual danger of sliding from hard-nosed reportage into a glutinous ‘lives of the saints’ approach to their subjects and their immediate ...”

“... been established: on their day off, men went drinking and women went to church. The women of Paris may have had little time for the priests the old regime had foisted on them, but they preserved the image of a male saviour who was gentle, celibate and ready to die. They cherished at the same time, Roudinesco says, the image of Marat, but for a different ...”

“... pregnant with a view to avoiding, a custodial sentence. The possibility, however, that other women may do that is one of many factors I have to bear in mind in this difficult case.’ Spot the difference? The whole nasty episode situates Pickles in the body of judges who send women to prison more often and for longer than men with similar records who are ...”

“... sheets’. Jim’s tastes are only slightly more orthodox. The cartoon character Tinker Bell may drive him ‘absolutely nutso’ but primarily, as Abby points out, he’s ‘interested in women masturbating’. ‘Any woman masturbates anywhere, I want to know about it,’ agrees Jim. Jim may be all talk, but at least ...”

“... F.R. Leavis, as well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired and which Wittgenstein may or may not have read or seen but was not predisposed to like. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Hawkes is merely engaged in a ludic ramble. He earns some of his jokes, and one of the best things about his books is that ...”

“... how the intentions of designers and makers are embroidered, elaborated and subverted. Buildings may be old or new: the life in them is, by definition, modern. Halle’s book corrects any tendency one might have to believe that there can be, or ever was, a golden age when an uncorrupted system of visual codes governed the man-made environment. Perhaps in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between what he is as a creature of nature ... and those other creatures of nature which we may, without derogation, call objects.’ By reconnecting language to its origins in the body, principally the ‘EAR’ and the ‘BREATH’, poetry and life, it is argued, will regain the organic vitality they lost just before Herodotus. Much of the millennial ...”

“... and Hitler, for whom anti-smoking was merely a sideline. Contemporary anti-smokers, though they may sometimes seem equally despotic by temperament, have a more limited area of concern: their own bodies – and in some cases, those of their nearest and dearest. From this tender little shrine, however, it is a stone’s throw to the cathedral of ‘personal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... says there’s been a big Sikh procession in Rosehill Street, men with swords on floats. ‘Like May Day, you mean?’ ‘I don’t know. They didn’t look very pleased. They’re still mad about Mrs Gandhi.’ He’s wearing a spell rolled round and sewn into a piece of white linen. It’s a magic word that only the man who wrote it can ...”

“... they fear that the martyr-venerating warriors of Islam and the rough Catholics of Latin America may not be deterred from small-scale warfare by the threat of international escalation. Acts of Faith, Hans Koning’s scenario, warns of a danger of global nuclear war arising from the Hispanic connections of the United States. Tim O’Brien’s more discursive ...”