“... It may surprise those who do not already know it that the world centre for the study of the life and work of Bertrand Russell is at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Shortly before he died Russell sold his vast collection of manuscripts and personal papers to McMaster for a huge sum of money in order to finance the various projects of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation ...”

“... at some deep level, and by reference to the future, they were all batting in the same team. One may consider a striking fact about these French writers: that their profoundest works, the works that still speak to us and can influence us – Candide, Le Neveau de Rameau, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Rousseau’s Confessions – are works of ferocious, if ...”

“... last of the 19th-century great men’, but Debray will have none of it. Mitterrand himself may belong to the 19th century, he argues, but it’s more likely that de Gaulle ‘was really the first great man of the 21st century’. And his admiration does not stop there. There is the wonderful austerity of de Gaulle’s refusal to pander to the ...”

“... like to know? He hasn’t a drop of love for his children, for me, or for anyone but himself. I may be a heathen, but I love the children, and unfortunately I still love him too, cold Christian that he is, and now my heart is torn in two with doubts: should I go to Moscow or not? How can I possibly please everyone? Because as God is my witness I am happy ...”

“... emotional and intellectual ground efficiently and fast. Part of the trouble with these scenes may be that Mulisch just doesn’t write the very best dialogue, but I think the real problem is inherent in the novel’s structure and the very powerful message which that structure is designed to put across. The interests of fiction have deferred here to the ...”

“... traced (e.g. Colonel Deacon, Herbert (“Hubby”) G. Wright), and have long been reported missing may have disappeared in this way.’ Clark earlier sets down a rumour from Scotland that in the Battle of Loos the Warwickshire Regiment got ‘so undisciplined’ that the Scots Guards turned their machine-guns on them. This is not confirmed in The Unknown ...”

“... its meaning, if not always in its intent, its role in the total picture. But the fastidious reader may find the manner somewhat too unbuttoned, the register too colloquial. He could point, in evidence, to such sentences as ‘De Sade invented libertine heroes who used their passionate stick whenever it could be set aflame’ or to the translation of Ernst ...”

“... makes Basilius irresponsible. Sometimes Norbrooke’s valuable insistence on political content may be taken too far. In the ‘Jocabethan’ admiration for the republican constitution of Venice he finds another key to the conservatism of Jonson, who ‘pointedly set Volpone in the mercantile republic of Venice, and showed that its vaunted claims for ...”

“... but not seen. It would have been much improved by a stronger sense of context, for while Brown may be largely lost to us as a knowable individual he is not entirely so. The few papers tell us something, and the circumstances of his life and work might be pieced together convincingly enough to describe in outline the qualities of the man who was able to ...”

“... use the day room. They were also given simple tasks which they were required to do together. (This may be the much more gripping prototype of Big Brother, although in the modern version everyone in the house deludedly believes themselves to be celebrities or interesting.) At the first meeting Rokeach asked the three men their names. Joseph said: ‘My name is ...”

“... by the Irgun in the newspaper version of Land of Black Gold when the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. Hergé drove to France with his wife, sister-in-law, niece and Siamese cat, which according to Peeters he sometimes took for walks on a lead. Leopold III surrendered on 27 May; placed under house arrest in his palace ...”

“... architecture was a prominent part of this: that’s why German modernist architects like Ernst May were hired to design it. Many of the posters of the time exhort peasants to flock to collective farms that look not unlike Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. The move towards the freakish fantasies and historical references of high Stalinism came later, along ...”

“... grandparents when his hippie mother declined to pack him along on her spiritual journey – may also notice, with a shiver, that Houellebecq’s murderer in The Map and the Territory is another plastic surgeon with a clinic in the hills above Cannes: father and killer are one. The casual-seeming sentences from Atomised lay bare the kind of associative ...”

“... and Chouchou on holiday near Arcachon in 1916. Debussy died in 1918. A century later, his music may at first appear more decorative than radical. The shock of the new is hard to feel at a distance, but as Stephen Walsh observes, we expect the music of the modernist generation, of whom Debussy was the first, to be difficult, abstruse, even rebarbative. The ...”

“... but certain, in Godfrey-Smith’s view, that octopuses have rich subjective experience. But they may have even more than this. According to some theorists, notably Stanislas Dehaene, a particular kind of mental processing, the sort that involves completing novel tasks extended over time, not only goes hand in hand with human consciousness, but helps explain ...”