“... out of SOE’s generosity were probably the Albanians: Hoxha’s tyranny endures to this day. It may occur to the reader, as it occurred to Lord Selborne (the last head of SOE), that SOE agents, especially those equipped with W/T sets, were admirably placed to establish a post-war intelligence network, as the Russians were doing. We do not know what ...”

“... we agreed that if there was one man in the world we did not envy it was David Robinson. He may have chosen a fascinating subject, but to marshal the facts, to make sense of them and to produce a readable and entertaining book was like climbing Everest without oxygen. He was faced with a staggering amount of material. More has been written about Chaplin ...”

“... It will be seen that these horrible facts are absolutely fundamentally unacceptable. They may win their authors a Nobel Prize, but those who discuss the mind know that something is seriously wrong. Sperry reappears on the scene to make matters worse. In a series of experiments, he examined the apparent mosaic representation of the world in a ...”

“... when told to leave their homes before being exterminated. Though the symbolic coherence may lie beyond her, it is in the experience of Lisa that the disparate structure must justify itself. It is customary for Thomas to place a female consciousness at the centre of a fictional structure, and for that consciousness to dictate the structure. In his ...”

“... Moonies brainwash them, I am told, into hating their parents and families. Other Californian cults may do the same. The British Conservative Party is a long way from California, and it is still some way from being a cult: yet in recent years odd things have been happening to the Conservative Party. Conservatives have been asked to believe that virtually ...”

“... Italian cemeteries and to the marble hands of deceased royal children at Osborne House, but there may also be a growing fascination with the mixed feelings which such art stirs in us and some curiosity as to the consolations which it once provided. For the artists who created these things – unlike the modern sculptors who appear to have a similar interest ...”

“... I don’t expect you to spend two hours here”; they say “Fair enough.” ’ ‘Fair enough’ may indeed be what they say to Carol, but it’s probably not what they are saying to themselves. Yet there they are again, the punters, once more forking out good money for bad sex. Carol and Sharon have little need to brood on the niceties of ...”

“... Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without meticulous attention to the literary techniques and artistry of the ...”

“... out of account – is the murderous entail of Anglo-Irish history, in which, as a Cork man, he may fairly be considered expert. But unlike most experts, above all most specialists in Ireland’s past, he knows how little has to be told and how much is best left to the reader’s own memory and imagination. The point about an entail, as Mrs Bennet ...”

“... terror. I must also condemn a terror which is practised blindly on the Algiers streets and which may any day strike down my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice.’ Even so judicious a critic as Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing 13 years later, saw fit to comment: ‘The defence of his mother required support for ...”

“... Faith, will give pleasure to those readers who are prepared to settle for the first quality but may disappoint those who have been led to expect insights a little sharper than those on show here. This story of Margery and George Ince, living in Rome, where George is employed by some sort of multinational philanthropic and acronymic organisation, falls into ...”

“... afternoon into the heat of the tropics. They leave a smell of the impossible. Individually they may not be profound; they may not, like travel, be broadening. But the pleasure and the power are enormous. This taste of the unfamiliar has of course to come from the travellers themselves, from their expectations and their ...”

“... job.’ ‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it – the security bit. The pictures and things may be safe enough – even the dinosaurs – but I can’t say I feel it myself.’ ‘Oh, so you think I’m no good at it,’ said the young man quickly. ‘There were dozens in for the job – dozens, I don’t mind telling you. But they just happened to ...”

“... suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now Alexander’s manageably-sized study of the whole corpus of the poetry, and Woodward’s of The Pisan ...”

“... But there are other elements in it which, given the author and given the text he is explicating, may come as more of a surprise. Much of the book is witty and ironic and insouciant in tone; almost all of it shows a fertile, restless intelligence hard at work; in some respects, it is a model of how to make a little learning go a long way. The resourcefulness ...”