“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... husband; many people thought that she had meant to seduce Bywaters into doing so. ‘Illicit love may lead to crime,’ the judge instructed the jury, adding unconvincingly: ‘You must not, of course, let your disgust carry you too far.’ In her novel about the case, A Pin to See the Peepshow, F. Tennyson Jesse suggested that the crime for which Edith ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the best books in the entire literature on the sociology of revolution. This is a compliment which may not be welcomed unequivocally by Knight himself, who takes a dim view of sociologists and documents some good reasons for doing so. But for all his awareness of the importance of chance events and the vagaries of individual motivation, he is never disposed to ...”

“... the possibility that we are not merely double but multiple? The possibility is explored that we may tune into different selves much as we tune into a radio station. What seems to be a much less problematic aspect of our functioning is brought into focus by Mary Warnock in her book on memory. Her aim is to find an answer to the elusive question of why we ...”

“... and village squires and evening parties. James’s view of the materials available to the writer may strike us today as somewhat old-fashioned and unenterprising, but there is a basic shrewdness in what he says. Without the ‘density of felt life’ which the artist almost involuntarily was vouchsafed in these materials he is thrown back on his own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be a volunteer from the neighbouring republic of Daghestan, and who said that while there may not be many volunteers at the moment (there certainly were not, as far as we could tell), a continuing Russian operation would inflame the North Caucasus and make terrorists of the unemployed youth for decades. All of this went into Gritchin’s rambling ...”

“... of Dave’s countrynmen to the marrow just to be associated with characters like him. Of course, I may have been particularly susceptible to the weevilly charm of his world, thanks to the atmospheric coming I’d had of it. I’d set out for a Calais the previous night by boat train – the very phrase is enough to agitate the brine in the blood of old ...”