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“... as to the value of revered works of literature need every so often to be dispelled, even if it means that some people swear off the canon altogether. For most others, the results aren’t likely to be so decisive or long-lasting. Like the warnings issued about cigarettes, the cautions about eggs, alcohol and chocolate, or the recent scare in the US about ...”

“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... perspective, we are living in an ice age, because there is ice at the poles – which has by no means always been the case. Fifty-odd million years ago, not only was there no ice at the North Pole, the temperature there was 23ºC. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last cool snap of this current ice age – known as a ‘glacial’, to distinguish it ...”

“... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...”

“... From other male writers of the period there are victim parables and gender-bending allegories: David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (a wife goes feral, is tolerantly fed and clothed by the husband, and ultimately gets run to death by hounds); David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman (the rejected male lover gives up and dies just ...”

“... of Fleet Street and Shepherds Bush. The massage has become the message. The accusation is by no means new, though those principally involved in communication between government and governed have always bristled at its airing. They have reacted as if confronted by some paranoid fantasy of the sort devised to underpin the plot of a thriller. A typical ...”

“... on to recommend and support the madness of the Lords’ rejection of the Budget. Like Mr Mackay, David Dutton has lumbered his book with a subtitle: ‘Gentleman in Politics’. Austen Chamberlain was certainly in politics and probably a gentleman. But it is not clear whether ‘a gentleman in politics’ is meant to describe some particular political ...”

“... instance of the age-old project of ‘making a human being by other than the ordinary reproductive means’, by which man seeks to ‘raise himself above the status that nature seems to have assigned him’. The Greeks, for whom the essence of being was in the outward form, dreamt up the fable of the sculptor, Pygmalion. Cartesian man, obsessed with ...”

“... fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive writing and ...”

“... crowding round the stove – is the only place of security in the book. Any venture into the world means loss: Meaulnes can’t find his way back to the Domain, Frantz loses his child-fiancée, his parents can’t find Frantz, Meaulnes can’t find Frantz, Seurel in the end loses everything, even the child he had hoped to bring up as his own, while Meaulnes ...”

“... rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’? After all, the Zapatista movement likes to appear as something of a phantom, expressing itself in concealments and ...”

“... the government as soon as possible. They therefore needed a capable leader and, whatever the means by which he was chosen, their leader was usually the ablest man in the party. From 1832, the 19th-century Conservative leaders were Peel, Lord Derby, Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. Except possibly Derby, who was at least as interested in translating the ...”

“... be allowed in this country.’ Lady Austin would have enjoyed Elton John’s ‘marriage’ to David Furnish last year – even the Daily Express managed to celebrate it as a ‘triumph for gay rights’ – in the Windsor Guildhall, where Charles had married Camilla only eight months before. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership ...”