“... to what Showalter sometimes seems to suggest), in any straightforward statistical fashion. One may plausibly contend that, for much of the past two or three centuries, women have outnumbered men in the ranks of the mentally disturbed. Still, for the most part, this has not been in such gross disproportion that one could sensibly call the disorder a ...”

“... Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National Organiser for the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, extending our concerns to a campaign against the use of napalm. I had stood for the Greater ...”

“... has vacillated; he has now drawn the rest of mankind into the quarrel, and resolving this tension may be the most urgent task facing the world in modern times.’ Athens is the ‘urbanising, fashion-conscious principle, removed from and usually insensitive to natural, cyclic views of the world’. It is ‘always scornful of ...”

“... May you live in interesting times!’ This most deadly of Chinese curses must be sounding in the minds of the people of Hong Kong as the territory creeps inexorably towards 30 June 1997, and its handing-back to Communist China. Ever since 1982, when Margaret Thatcher travelled to the Middle Kingdom to set the whole 1997 question alight, Hong Kong has been living through interesting – that is to say, difficult – times ...”

“... cause in Spain in 1936 she wrote to a friend: ‘I feel it is my duty not to do my duty.’ In May 1935 the bank Blake had been working for in Paris collapsed in circumstances which meant its top officials might go to jail. Blake fled to America with his mother and Stead. He had been overworked and unsatisfied by the world of banking; now, they ...”

“... was not out there defending the students against the police, as many faculty members were. We may well think that this was some cheek, or some chic, chutzpah well beyond the call of Oedipal protest. But it’s not so easy to see why Mrs Trilling should be ‘shaken’ by the photograph, and her reading of the telephone call is extraordinary. ‘This was ...”

“... and bows and arrows. They show why man-made objects, even purely aesthetic objects like these, may only be fully understandable in the environment in which they were made. It would be absurd not to be grateful for the opportunity to see so much original work. But it is impossible not to regret the diminishment of its power. Gathered together in private ...”

“... Evening, 10 May 1987. Thousands of American fingers flick their television remotes to Old Time Gospel Hour. The Reverend Jerry Falwell steps forward to address an adoring audience, worn Bibles in hand, blessed suppers of body and blood recently consumed. His message is a comforting one for this gathering. ‘They are scared to walk near one of their own kind right now ...”

“... academy, McGann responds to its changing sub-cultures: by 1990 his prose was harder to read, and may have become vaguer instead of merely seeming so. But in his central stand on history he has given little if any ground. He has little in common with the Califomian style of so-called New Historicism, with its reliance on over-general propositions attributed ...”

“... In Ashes to Ashes, a character called Rebecca tells another character called Devlin, who may be her husband, about the man who may be (or may have been) her lover. He did work for a travel agency. He was a guide. He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the ...”

“... to Nathaniel Haynes’s History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the ...”

“... suggests, Lacan’s ‘discourse of the Other’ (or its extensions in post-colonial theory) may seem to come closest among modern formulations to the extraordinary sense of occupation, or being occupied by another’s discourse, that is such a chilling feature of Othello; but the play itself also gives us its own language for this tragic loading/lodging ...”

“... observed it so completely that he returned from Britain to the certainty of a lifetime in jail. It may be, of course, that Slovo was ordered abroad by some secret Party directive: we just don’t know. Everything that followed depended on that derision to leave and yet it is mysterious. There is no doubt that Slovo lived a life of complete political commitment ...”

“... Rights, and the 40 per cent who wanted a more representative British judiciary (whatever that may mean). The poll was a graphic indication of the task facing the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, in restoring confidence in the administration of criminal justice. Popular doubts about the fitness of the judiciary to protect civil rights and liberties are ...”

“... he had previously tried a rabies vaccine on two patients, a man named Girard, who recovered but may not have had rabies, and a girl named Julie-Antoinette Poughon, who died. For another, Pasteur ‘had never tried, not even once, to cure symptomatic rabies in animals by any method before he decided to treat Girard’. He began animal experiments a few days ...”