“... to understand what experis in other fields are saying. A few weeks earlier, the editor of Nature, John Maddox, reported on a conference about scientific journals and electronic publishing. Now that electronic mail (email) allows instant publication, printed journals carry a time penalty. Moreover, as email contributions and commentary appear side by side they ...”

“... When the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was closed down on 5 July 1991, a million people throughout the world lost their deposits. Many of the losers were from the Third World; small businessmen who had struggled to make a living in countries other than their own, and who had been impressed by BCCI’s multilingual staff and its often-trumpeted concern for the starving millions ...”

“... popular rule. No modern politics can deliver that, and there are persuasive arguments, from John Stuart Mill to Schumpeter, to suggest that we’d be unwise to try to make it do so. The more serious criticism is that there’s little mention in the Treaty on Union of an active government for Europe. The purpose of rule, to maximise the benefits of ...”

“... inconsistency unperceived by the speaker’. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Ricks quotes Sir John Mahaffy’s answer, when asked to distinguish the Irish bull from similar freaks of language: ‘The Irish bull is always pregnant.’ More often than the OED appreciates, the Irish bull knows he’s pregnant and is offering his audience an occasion to ...”

“... in and possible debts to black people (not just in his writing: one of his black servants, John Lewes, risked his life to save some members of Twain’s family from certain death – an altruism also exhibited by Jim in Huckleberry Finn). A lot of this material is familiar, as Professor Fishkin most scrupulously acknowledges and details (there are some ...”

“... bore faint traces of the grand manner of the 17th century’, and that the acolyte is evidently St John. All this is a part of the history, the mentalité, of Octave – and so of Yourcenar. These are all fragments peeled from a few dowdy decades in the centuries rolling past Yourcenar’s inward eye. They are so far from everyday conceptions of reality that ...”

“... making him the country’s first openly gay elected official. When a State Senator named John Briggs introduced an amendment that would have prevented gays from teaching in the California public schools, a grass-roots movement, led by Milk, rose and defeated the Bill by a two-to-one majority. Gay power was at its high-water mark. It was around that ...”

“... back, Spartacus, Moses and even Robin Hood were played by Americans, while Nero, Pharoah, King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had British accents. To use an American for the hero was only natural, but the hiring of Britons to play a specifically political kind of villain says something particular: namely, that American mythology has quite sharply ...”

“... gives it a decisive advantage over the heterogeneous and less professional opposition. John Carlin of theIndependent has judged that ‘the ANC’s arrogance, as much as its naivety, blinded it to the fact that the scales were tipped heavily against it.’ The myth that a cunning adversary had finally been bludgeoned by sanctions, armed struggle ...”

“... established Middleton’s links with the oppositional politics of 17th-century Puritanism; now, John Strachniewski – in one of several excellent essays in R.V. Holdsworth’s anthology of criticism of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women beware women and The Changeling – has revealed a pervasive Calvinist vocabulary and psychology in Middleton’s ...”

“... resistant when it comes to abandoning myths. To cite a parallel example, my friend and colleague, John Chilton, has proved conclusively that although the great Blues singer Bessie Smith died following a car accident, it was not because she was refused treatment by a white Southern hospital – a version that is still widely and emotionally cited. I have ...”

“... form of lawful socialism.’ This complaint over Frei’s victory may be contrasted with John Gunther’s enthusiasm in his reliable Inside Latin America (1967). ‘Chile came close to voting itself Communist in 1964 ... But Frei, who calls himself a Christian humanist, averted this by winning the Presidency against a Marxist candidate after a ...”

“... control of female sexuality, looms large in both movements. American fundamentalists like John Straton, writing in the Twenties, described the corrupting role of women in images strikingly similar to those to be found in the jeremiads of the Muslim militants. ‘The most sinister and menacing figure of our modern life is the ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”