“... and this approach to Olive Schreiner, which places her as a polemicist rather than a novelist, may be the most durable basis for her fame. In one of her letters Schreiner predicted that potential biographers would never understand her horror of falsity. How does a biographer, accustomed to delve for a buried self, relate to a person who presents herself ...”

“... ever managed to become accepted as providing the model for ‘correct’ speech.) Be that as it may, it would of course be grossly misleading to suggest that in England people do not care much about their language, or that they have no views about what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. Floods of letters to the BBC, not to mention regular complaints in ...”

“... Maschler, but in spite of this the place is nearly always empty. Occasionally a transient figure may appear, swiftly and rather furtively, to carry off a take-away ordered earlier by telephone. Two young Indian waiters in dinner jackets hover apprehensively at the back of the room, while behind and above them, seated on a raised platform, a somewhat older ...”

“... At first glance Fire-Power may seem to be a professional study by gunners about gunners and for gunners, but if readers not privileged to have served in the Royal Regiment can absorb the technical information and diagrams they will learn a lot about the realities of warfare in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, they will appreciate the extent to which fire-power has dominated combat and what techniques have been evolved to exploit it and overcome it ...”

“... not much liking the human race and deducing from the circumstances of his arrival that they may all be mad. Annoyingly, he cannot remember the details of his pre-human existence; nor can he escape his prison of humanity. At the moment of death, he is sitting on a park bench, and performs his metempsychosis trick on a nearby management consultant. But ...”

“... and, above all, far too many Greeks.’ ‘Good, well, I understand you, bey effendi, you may trust both my son and me.’ It was arranged that Alecco should work and sleep at the doctor’s house in Hayreddin Pasha Street. His room was not much larger than a cupboard, but then, neither had it been at home. Loneliness was his trouble, not ...”

“... but in these pieces there is a looseness of structure which sometimes becomes merely lax. It may seem unfair to remark that there are self-indulgent passages of this kind in ‘Monday June 26th 1916’, since Strachey’s declared purpose there was to record the events of a single day, abjuring ‘selected realisms’ in the hope of capturing ‘its ...”

“... but for those who are interested in the nature of philosophy. Although a great man of science may have many or all of Moore’s qualities, one would not expect them to be imprinted upon his work, and if one speaks of dishonesty in science, one has something very specific and very rare in mind – the falsification of results. Yet many philosophical ...”

“... in word or in deed. They are doing a magnificent job, although the organisers of the experiment may well be having moral qualms about its effect in such areas as American energy policies and Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan. (Britain has presumably been the subject of a pilot experiment for the last thirty years). I find myself able to resist this hypothesis ...”

“... individual conscience against corporate ukase – has recurrent relevance. Even toping Tom May, the ‘tankard-bearing Muse’ whose death gave such pleasure to the poet Marvell (‘came to his death,’ says Aubrey, ‘after drinking with his chin tyed with his cap (being fatt) – suffocated’), showed relative restraint in plumping out the plot and ...”

“... world, brrrh.’ These remarks are only half-jokes. There are no jokes at all in a letter of 12 May 1958, by which time, it is true, Kokoschka had become yours disgusted, Villeneuve, Lake Geneva – where he and Olda had settled in 1953 – on most artistic and political issues: In our ‘non-objective’ epoch, especially now that they have the action ...”

“... John Kenneth Galbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if contentment is a goal for the rest of us, it is clearly a goad for Galbraith, for whom it is only the tolerant companion of evils that a suitably ...”

“... in most unmaternal fashion. Still, no one could say this violence was ‘mystified’ so there may be no reason to quarrel with Barthes. We need to ask ourselves what genre of book Visser’s is. She is evidently deep into ancient history, as well as medieval and Renaissance etiquette books, colonial memoirs, cookery books of all nations, and American ...”

“... disappearance. Opinion polls regularly show IFP support at 5 per cent or less – but this may be deceptive. Rural South Africa remains unpolled and the IFP’s largest following is in rural Natal, while on the Reef some IFP supporters, knowing that they are part of a hated minority, probably hide their allegiance. Even so, Lawrence Schlemmer’s ...”

“... placed in such a way as to give them no support fore and aft, so that any general resonance they may have in isolation is diminished in context. Worse, her argument forces her to isolate what seems most commonplace in Ashbery, and might be taken as a measure of the lack of real distinction which his obscurity obscures – for example: But I don’t set much ...”