“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... solidarity was frustrated. Azbel and his companions were not to be deterred, however. In May 1977 they managed to get a number of foreign scientists to Moscow for a special jubilee meeting of the seminar. Fifty or sixty people crowded into his apartment, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of this unique scientific institution, and to emphasise the ...”

“... 1894, whose reasoning, as Stephen Walker points out, is extremely rum. It rules that ‘in no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower on the psychological scale.’ Walker reasonably remarks that it is not even clear whether explanations of ...”

“... two contradict each other; while DeLloyd Guth’s account of the transition from debt to contract may well be profound but is so obscurely written that it’s hard to be sure. Between the more extreme elements, however, are a group of essays that display solid merit and, in one or two cases, real distinction. Rudolf Heinze’s study of proclamations shows ...”

“... boroughs are likely to be under different political control from the ILEA, and since the GLC may be, it would be unreasonable to give any of them the power of refusal. Given the way the constitution is set up, there is little alternative to this system, but it is not difficult to understand the anxiety and friction to which it has given rise. But ...”

“... civil servants for Mastermind, but then he is indeed a retired civil servant. Why, the reader may wonder, did he choose the period 1793 to 1816? Was this age richer in horrors than any other? There is no way of knowing. Quoted here is an estimate of 1812 that ‘perhaps not less than five thousand natives of these islands perish yearly at sea.’ The ...”

“... unfortunately, both could be found in England well before the Black Death, though their numbers may well have increased later as a way of using productive land from which the plough had retreated. The death of a third to a half of the population was obviously a disaster, but it needs more than Thirsk’s observation that ‘not only was the demand for food ...”

“... who has wondered whether the history of the United States can be forced into a Thatcherite mould may well find the book of interest. Johnson announces at the outset that he comes to American history ‘completely fresh’, with no qualifications other than a love of the country and a willingness to immerse himself in the literature of its past. It’s true ...”

“... the Roof Beam Carpenters’ occupied 60 pages of one issue of the New Yorker in November 1955. In May 1957, there was ‘Zooey’, which ran to more than one hundred pages. The New Yorker at this time was the boy Updike’s literary home – his ideal home, he has said – and as a ‘Talk of the Town’ wordsmith he was honing a few heart-shaped locutions of ...”

“... close-packed into a compass smaller than that of the Isle of Wight’. It is possible that Barnes may not have read Williams-Ellis: he may only have read John Gaze’s history of the National Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through ...”

“... was good and original pedagogy to be droll. To be so on the subject of the extremely upper classes may seem less useful. They evidently caused him to suffer, to fear that they might think him common, or, nastiest of all their put-downs, middle-class. Betjeman was undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of ...”

“... Disarmament and declares the ‘garrison intellectual’ to be ‘alive and well’. The allusions may be apposite, but the academic freedom issue remains unclarified. We are merely told that academics will continue to take sides on the leading ideological controversies of their time, exercising their rights as citizens to do so. Are they also crossing the ...”

“... feminist dictum when he makes a great to-do about the ‘difference’ of women, a difference that may gain its happiest expression in the kitchen. Gender, according to the authors of Nostalgia and Sexual Difference, is among the pointers to a worrying backlash against the Women’s Movement in America, with feminists (rechristened ‘Amazons’) held to blame ...”