“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... closeness to go to the point of raising issues of textuality, partiality and readability. These may be omissions that go with the territory of traditional biography, but, in the case of Mallarmé, it seems, at the very least, ironic. Rather than speculating about unconscious signification, discontinuity among documents or textual ambiguity, Millan sticks to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”