“... of Communist leadership, Stalin and Dimitrov, Mao Zhe Dong and Ho Chi Minh, even Khrushchev, may have been politically corrupt in the abuse of power and their cynical acceptance of the cheapness of human life. But their personal life-style was modest, informed by a puritanical ethos. The rot finally set in with Brezhnev. Khrushchev could say, and even ...”

“... sexist swan, helping you to imagine yourself with a great, big bill beating above that girl. It may be that today’s escape route from fashion for male poets is into deprivation, for women into over-achievement and showing-off. Nonetheless, the poetry here is genuinely in the predicament, and seems the more genuine the more one reads it. Out of cavern ...”

“... point of view, but as I moved, so did he.’) Full face, three-quarter face, side and back views may look different, but they are all part of the same head. Grunfeld has taken profiles for his portrait of Rodin from documents. Some comments are contradictory, but his portrait, like the best of Rodin’s, adds up. The character he has drawn has the vivacity ...”

“... owl of Minerva, finally makes his escape over the border in search of Egalitaria, a land which may prove either a heuristic fiction or a historical possibility. On this wistfully suspended note, the novel shifts out of its satirical register into a genuinely moving conclusion. Caritat, who holds imaginary conversations with Kant and Condorcet, is a liberal ...”

“... of individuals, how did it simultaneously give birth to totalitarian ideologies? These questions may be new for anthropologists accustomed to studying remote, non-modern societies, but they are extremely familiar to historians of modern ideas, who may lose patience with Dumont’s somewhat laborious manner. This would be ...”

“... way. In ‘To Sleep’ she writes: Clasp’d in her faithful shepherds sheltering arms Well may the village girl sweet slumbers prove, And they, O gentle Sleep! still taste thy charms Who wake to labour, liberty and love. Her early verse is preoccupied with death and suicide; in six sonnets the speaker, Werther, is presented without irony. The sonnets ...”

“... half the year. But he’s not simply flouting the parish boundaries of PC, in which only a woman may write as a woman, or only a black may address the themes of race. Phillips’s contumaciousness arises from a more philosophical view of identity, which his fictions propose in their ventriloquism and polyphony, without ...”

“... the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again and be ...”

“... For the theoretical physicist Lev Landau, cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt. It may be that to dwell too long and too intensely on the nature of the universe or life or consciousness ultimately weakens one’s grip on reality. It is probably unwise to inhale too deeply the fumes that emerge from such centres as the Santa Fe Institute, set up ...”

“... and not as an author. Any suggestion that these defects received ‘ “passive authorisation” may be confidently rejected’. All writers who have noticed after a second or third reading that one of their sculpted sentences came back from the printer as a mangled torso will sympathise with Gabler here. So will all readers who find that Gabler’s ...”

“... to extract some joy from life, however cruel life might be. Security, serenity and success may not necessarily be the goals for which most people will always aim. There may be a future in which solitude will not decay so readily into loneliness. At any rate, I became convinced that the most common ideal of happiness ...”

“... to hell for his sins. But this, it seems to me, is too severe and one-sided a reading of what may be the greatest scene in all opera – the scene in which the statue comes to supper with the Don and invites him to accompany him to the nether world. Chilled to the bone by the touch of the statue’s hand, the Don is vanquished by supernatural ...”

“... significantly different under Thatcher from what they were under Asquith and Lloyd George. This may seem a curious observation to make in the aftermath of a Conservative Budget which has reduced the marginal rate of income tax for even the richest of the idle rich to 40 per cent while numbers of the poor are left in the trap of marginal rates of 85 per cent ...”

“... of putting it, not his.) In the latter the poet is not speaking shiftily of others from whom he may easily distance himself (and the reader likewise): instead, he implicates himself and the rest of us in the experience – by dramatising it, by objectifying it, by giving it a frame, by finding a voice appropriate to the utterance of it. Thus, the Jew who ...”

“... events in Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Baltic republics suggest that the Soviet political system may indeed be moving in this direction. Yet there is a long way to go. While the social forces behind Gorbachev may be stronger than they appear, perestroika’s continuation is no more inevitable than its emergence was. It ...”