“... Woof, Woof, Dear Lord (Kedros, 1995) give something of their flavour. Dimitriou’s first novel, May Your Name Be Blessed, is a more likely candidate for cultural migration: history is more explicitly present than it is in the stories, offering a handhold for foreign readers. The displacements that followed World War Two and the collapse of Communism in ...”

“... their ability to reason, appraise, act and participate. Seeing people in terms only of their needs may give us a rather meagre view of humanity.To use a medieval distinction, we are not only patients, whose needs demand attention, but also agents, whose freedom to decide what to value and how to pursue it can extend far beyond the fulfilment of our needs. The ...”

“... the police had no conclusive evidence against any of the four by the end of the first week in May, although in law this would not have prevented them from making arrests. On 6 May the Lawrences met Nelson Mandela. Speaking of the police, Doreen Lawrence remarked: ‘They are patronising us and when they do that to me I ...”

“... also a defeat for traditional norms of parliamentary government. This scenario will be repeated in May, when the coalition government puts the proposal to alter the voting system to a referendum: leading Conservatives will be urging people to vote no while remaining bound together with Clegg and his fellow Lib Dems as the coalition pushes the rest of its ...”

“... over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England.In fact, at the time Baldwin spoke that heart-stopping sight had not been seen for decades in large parts ...”

“... and forming the Moon from the debris produced by the impact. Collisions between large bodies may also be responsible for altering the rotation of Venus, which takes longer to spin on its axis than it does to orbit the Sun and hence has a day longer than its year; for the surprising density of Mercury, which may once ...”

“... Early​ results matter in politics. The news on the morning of 6 May seemed to confirm a familiar story. Labour had taken two totemic Tory councils, Wandsworth and Westminster, piling on metropolitan voters but failing to ignite the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before the election the Mail had warned that anything over four hundred should be seen as a ‘disaster ...”

“... hatred of the Nazis was greater than his hatred of ‘the English Empire’.* Eliot and MacLean may be seen as poles apart. What they shared was more important. Each was impelled by a duty to his language, by the necessity of modernising its capacities and fighting its insularities; each was to become a cultural figurehead, the quintessential representative ...”

“... identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too reverential when they write about their husbands. There is, however, some criticism here. Early in their marriage she had grumbled at what seemed excessive hours of work in the lab and got the reply: ‘You have first claim ...”

“... what it means to move to the middle ground, of course. The fabled Republican negative campaigners may have a problem with exploiting it, even so. I can’t see them choosing to emphasise how soft money finances hard politics. In this, as in many issues between the parties, there is a kind of Mutual Assured Destruction which prevents the eruption of ...”

“... In May 1945 I was serving with a battalion of the British Eighth Army in victorious occupation of Gorizia, some thirty miles north of Trieste. We shared the town with a brigade of Yugoslav Partisans, and the relations between us were not good. Our lords and masters had decreed that the Partisans should be, for the time being, in charge of civil administration, while we confined ourselves to military duties ...”

“... and moon being fully predictable, they would determine possible dates. July would be too late, and May too early. That left just four possible days: 5, 6, 19 or 20 June. We worked out the odds on the weather on any one of these four dates conforming to requirements as being 13 to one against. So meteorologically, D-Day was bound to be a gamble against the ...”

“... After all, much domestic life goes unrecorded in letters or even journals. The literary biographer may sometimes have a device for penetrating this silence: he uses the autobiographical subtext of his subject’s books. Richard Holmes gives a perfect illustration of how this may legitimately and convincingly be done through ...”

“... of events in nearly all known human societies has been set by men? And, however undesirable this may have been, does not the resulting bias of the sources interpose near-insuperable obstacles for those concerned with the place of women in societies not responsive to statistical or anthropological analysis? There is the further difficulty that women’s ...”

“... the ‘classic realist mode’: their understanding of the conventions of that mode may make them anxious to break free and try something else, but that is a sequel that may or may not occur – in Lodge’s case it doesn’t. So Carey, although he ends by commending ...”