“... of Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party, which finally put an end to decades of hard-line Communism, may attract foreign investment. The Democratic Party had been publicly endorsed by the US Government in the course of the campaign. William Ryerson, the US Ambassador, even appeared at Sali Berisha’s rally and congratulated him in fluent Albanian. It was a rare ...”

“... him. And if he embarks on a memoir of himself, or they on a biography, the falsity of presentation may once again begin. If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation ...”

“... wit and grace has produced a brilliant, and immensely enjoyable, book. Stoye’s choice of subject may appear unconventional, and the regions discussed remote, although not now as remote as they seemed a few years ago. But those who choose to follow the twists and turns of Count Marsigli’s career will not soon forget this vain, quarrelsome and infinitely ...”

“... owners a useless carcass and empty pockets. I never met any of the unlucky buyers and the story may be apocryphal but it captures the sourness of the time. The city’s reunification brought no reconciliation. The Serbs who fought to live apart triumphed – their people believed that they had to flee from the Muslim-dominated city – and the Muslims and ...”

“... sentence sound because a sentence he said was a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung which – never not quite iambic though – is ten syllables that hang together – so – just so the way the elephant’s child took seventeen melons (the green crackly kind) and said to all his dear families ‘Goodbye. I am going to the great ...”

“... I was furious at the assumption that my reaction was one of fear. It did not occur to him that I may have been embarrassed for him; that I may have felt shame for him to be sitting there, in front of a black man, telling a story like that. It did not occur to him because he was not ashamed – and that bothered me. It ...”

“... universal humanity of the American ideal. There was anobility about this ideal, however naive it may sound to Europeans, and one strand of American isolationism has always related to it. Nevertheless, the intermingling of this tradition with a naive belief in the Utopian nature of Stalinist Russia produced a great deal of double think and double-talk. It is ...”

“... of the mind. Model, metaphor and simile are relations of likeness, not of identity. The mind may function like a computer, but so do I function like other land-based mammals. But I am not a computer, nor am I a chimp, an orang-utan, or a deer. Penrose rejects both the idea that the brain is a computer and the idea that it can be adequately modelled ...”

“... accounts Wolde-ab Wolde Mariam managed the first as respectably as he had the second. He died in May at the age of 87 in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, which became the 52nd sovereign state in Africa two years ago. Wolde-ab was buried in the cemetery of Tsetserat and a day of national mourning was declared. Hadas Ertra, the main newspaper, ran a long eulogy ...”

“... uncover the secrets of the atom and the nucleus within it. There is of course a danger here. Some may feel that Pais has been too close to Bohr and his family to provide a full and impartial account of his life. Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1885. He grew up in a large and happy family and was throughout his life particularly close to his brother ...”

“... physical and social life, in any discussion of the art of death. It is on this level that we may find an explanation for the present poverty of memorial art. The lack of a shared public life is perhaps what causes Howard Colvin to draw to a tactful halt and leaves Nigel Llewellyn mumbling worthily about AIDS at the end of his book. What good death art ...”

“... This, for instance, is Grippes’s experience of the événements of the late Sixties: 10 May 1968. Clouds of tear gas. Cars overturned in Paris streets. Grippes’s long-awaited autobiographical novel, Sleeping on the Beach, had appeared the day before. His stoic gloom as he watched students flinging the whole of the first edition onto a bonfire ...”

“... to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, I was struck by the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister ...”

“... for being in Africa – for being a journalist in Africa – this seemed like one. The world may not have cared about Somalia ... but I could force them to care by rubbing their faces in it every day, by shoving the pictures of starving kids ... in dispatches run regularly on the front page ... Somalia was the prism through which I came to view the rest ...”

“... been consigned to quicklime in the prison yard, could be buried in consecrated ground. ‘There may be trouble there,’ the news editor beamed. ‘This chap Alphon may cause a fuss.’ I had no idea who Alphon was, and after the burial in Wembley, I was none the wiser. There was nothing to report, so I gladly accepted ...”