“... these criticisms. ‘Bloated and muddled’, Hofstadter calls Gebstedter, and many readers may agree. The book is long. It is a pot-pourri. It is repetitive. The structure is haphazard. These are fair criticisms, but they are criticisms which miss one essential point of what is new and interesting in the Hofstadter phenomenon. This is a quality perhaps ...”

“... It appears to have five outpouchings, if this is the word’). These failures of recognition may have stemmed from a total loss of the concepts in question or from an inability to apply them to what is seen – it is unclear. Sacks characteristically throws no light on the question, though his data seem to suggest the latter alternative. Instead of ...”

“... to the left. The Labour share is 28 per cent. Even in the Polytechnics, whatever their reputation may be, the Labour share is 32 per cent. The favoured parties of academics are those of the Liberal/SDP Alliance. Yet this is in many ways an apolitical, even anti-political stance. Few Alliance votes come from the deeply committed; most are a protest against ...”

“... on that it did ‘not wish, by any means, to excite or encourage those to commence as Authors, who may happen to fancy that they possess the necessary qualifications’ – a sensible precaution which in the ensuing century had no deterrent effect whatsoever on the swelling crowd of hopeful but totally unqualified littérateurs. The bulk of the fund’s income ...”

“... them: ‘This attitude is understandable but perilous … it is historically evasive and may, in the worst outcome, prove self-defeating.’ Why so? Mulhern is quite clear about this. For him, as for, say, a group like the Tel Quel group in Paris, criticism is part of the class struggle, an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ‘the dominant ...”

“... will help to reflate the economy of country A. If country A reflates while country B deflates, it may do more to raise output and employment in the market-hungry export industries of country B than in the industries within its own borders. If it reflates alone, while countries B to Z are all busily deflating, its reflation ...”

“... the opening scene, deeply conventional – and not necessarily the worse for that. For, however we may praise originality, it is at least as important that art should be conventional. The best artists work not for ignorant but for trained audiences, which is why they are properly suspected of élitism. Novelists operate by satisfying certain prior ...”

“... Marxist political systems similar to those in Eastern Europe. And while even such regimes may not be entirely reliable, at least they are less liable to sudden changes because of the overthrow of a regime or the changing interests of a particular leader; and even when this does happen (as in Afghanistan), the Soviets then at least have a pretext for ...”

“... competitive display and the interior space expressed the increasing value of domestic privacy. He may well be right, but unfortunately he has little to say about the reasons for changes in values at this time, and his views on the importance of the nuclear family, as opposed to the extended family, among Florentine patricians are not shared by all his ...”

“... in Piero’s native town of Sansepolcro in the middle decades of the 15th century, the style may have seemed startling, but the content surely did not. Even the angels, the one major feature not explained by the Gospels, would have been familiar from earlier representations of the story. In the past they had usually been shown praying or reverently ...”

“... capture the American public from isolationism? The presence of the UN in America’s largest city may have contributed to the internationalising of the United States: but it also exposed the world organisation to American domestic pressures. Luard outlines rather summarily the impact of McCarthyism on the UN headquarters, which culminated in what he rightly ...”

“... context in 1770, with reference (significantly enough) to cricket. The classification above may not be the best possible – people still don’t theorise about games very much – but it does turn up several points of historical and psychological interest. One is that, over the last couple of centuries at most, the world has turned strongly towards ...”

“... of this first fat volume, so long awaited, it would be ungrateful not to regret that the work may never be complete: Dr Willi Schuh is 82. He calls his book a chronicle, and that is what it is: methodical, sequential, and evenly paced; in genre, the opposite of a poetic monologue. Yet Schuh has hoped in his own way to make Strauss talk: through unadorned ...”

“... to take and in the 1936 election he faced a furious right-wing campaign against him whose tenor may be judged by the fact that his supporters were reduced to chanting: ‘Long live the Jews!’ He was triumphantly re-elected and was the only Deputy in parliament to vote against French participation in the Berlin Olympics, on the grounds that they were bound ...”

“... West for both humint operations and intelligence collection from open sources. What Soviet sigint may lack in advanced technology, however, it can often make up by espionage. Even comparatively low-level spies like Geoffrey Prime in Britain and the Walker family in the United States are sometimes able to provide priceless technical intelligence. There is ...”