“... of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower. The recent Middle East peace conference in Madrid may therefore come to be seen as a watershed. With the Cold War over and the Gulf War won, President George Bush and James Baker, his Secretary of State, have adopted an attitude which the Israelis find so alarmingly even-handed that they have begun to suspect ...”

“... a half million after the first century of settlement, and has now reached three and a half. You may deplore the damage done to the cultural life and social organisation of the Maori, to the forests, to the local fauna. But if the popular wisdom, at home and abroad, now considers such a history reprehensible, there’s another view, no less reasonable, which ...”

“... the product of ‘a vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy’. ‘Carnovsky’ may be identified as Portnoy’s Complaint and other names given to Lonoff and Appel, but the point is that the effect on Roth’s fiction has been to turn him into a writer for whom the world external to himself hardly exists. It comes as no surprise, then, to ...”

“... to marry off one of the daughters Mr Poon has had by one of his concubines. ‘To have married May Ling, the daughter of a second concubine, into a respectable Cantonese family would have been an impossibility. Alternatively, setting her sights lower within the Chinese community would have been a major loss of face. Under the circumstances, a poor ...”

“... which I think is concealed behind this story. I do not say that I have found the key. Other keys may turn the lock just as well. But this is what I now feel, which I did not feel before. The first clue I found was banal. Schama is both a man of our times and uncomfortable in his times. He is a man of our times in the sense that he is not going anywhere in ...”

“... the fact that she’s been cast opposite Hadley because of their mutual resemblance. ‘Rose’ may be a more ‘unstable construction’ than she’d imagined. After a spell at home to watch over the death of her aunt, Rose escapes to Europe on the proceeds of her aunt’s mattress. In Greece she falls for the egregious Miles, and by this time we aren’t ...”

“... to accept ‘the “innocence” of any narrative’. Of course it is literally true that an axe may be ground consciously or otherwise in the account of any event, but in practice we are bound to accept the credibility of much we are told. What we read in newspapers, and the news we watch on TV, is not ‘innocent’, yet we accept most of it as basically ...”

“... and events, and the movement back and forwards in time so that matters dealt with in one volume may be elaborated in another, are handled with the organising skill once given to accountancy and literary agency. But although there is lots of technique, there is no style. The level of the writing is almost consistently commonplace, the dialogue rarely more ...”

“... is surely needed. The tone of dedications and letters soliciting patronage from potentates may strike us as embarrassing, but their language was surely well understood as conventional. You wouldn’t write so when sending a manuscript to a publisher or even applying to the Arts Council for a grant, but in either case you would do appropriately what ...”

“... tremour of agitation behind La Rochefoucauld’s calm comment that ‘however rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.’ Had he found at one time or another that everyone in the circle had let him down? But if you live in a hothouse of the commodity, like he and the salon ladies and gentlemen of his milieu, you must expect to find all ...”

“... learning occurs at the synapse – that is to say, the junction between the two cells. The change may take the form either of an increase in the amount of neurotransmitter released by the first cell or an increase in the number of receptors on the second cell, which enables it to take up more neurotransmitter molecules. Rose found that in chicks which had ...”

“... relationships. It raises the possibility that the many tales emphasising the importance of paideia may tell us more about upper-class dreams of a perfect world than about how the surrounding society actually worked. The upper-class position was perhaps more complex, less self-assured than their rhetoric often admits. Civic notables in the later Empire ...”

“... I: A Study in Power and Intellect (1974) and Carolly Erickson’s The First Elizabeth (1983) may not be works by ‘professional historians’, but that does not mean that they are without research or without value. What is, however, true is that MacCaffrey, the author of a remarkable trilogy beginning with The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime ...”

“... returned to the Soviet zone, and was taken in by Marianne’s mother. The wedding photograph that May shows a pretty girl in a dirndl, not noticeably pregnant, her curly blonde hair gathered at the back of her head, and a dark and sensitive young man, adrift in his suit. Siegfried had evidently been wrecked by the war; he moved from job to job and then, in ...”

“... of Dave’s countrynmen to the marrow just to be associated with characters like him. Of course, I may have been particularly susceptible to the weevilly charm of his world, thanks to the atmospheric coming I’d had of it. I’d set out for a Calais the previous night by boat train – the very phrase is enough to agitate the brine in the blood of old ...”