“... If, further, I cannot tell you what it is like, or indeed tell you anything at all about it, you may justly conclude that I’m not thinking of anything, indeed not really thinking at all. If we understand Parmenides in this sense, we can agree that to be thought of and to be go together. Well, almost. ‘Go together’ is not quite ‘are one’. Not every ...”

“... hard on the connection. Suppose that a man and woman are getting married. The bride feels that she may be making a mistake, that she will be swamped by her more successful husband-to-be. Weeks ago, she had been reading about a new dam being built in China, which had involved the flooding of entire villages and the obliterating of the evidence of hundreds of ...”

“... The Street of Crocodiles (1934). At the climax of the story, a shifty bookseller offers Lars what may or may not be a manuscript of Schulz’s final work, The Messiah, lost after its author was gunned down in the street by the SS in 1942. The high point of this very curious novel is Ozick’s vision of what Schulz’s lost ...”

“... as ‘symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar’: ‘If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger too … the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the stars brighter.’ More modestly, Muir asked: ‘Why should man value himself as more than a small ...”

“... of the man she falls in love with, an unidentified Arab state which the author has suggested may be Saudi Arabia. In The Pickup the sense of something terrible being about to happen is deflected onto ‘Abdu’, an illegal immigrant in South Africa who daren’t even use his proper name – Ibrahim – as he clings to his place in a country that wants to ...”

“... One group had already been immunised some time before with Pasteur’s new vaccine. On 31 May, they had been injected – along with the other, unimmunised group of 25 animals – with a culture of virulent anthrax bacilli. International observers, politicians, farmers, Army officers, Government officials and reporters were in Pouilly-le-Fort on 2 ...”

“... it contained not the slightest trace of misogyny or of self-contempt. Indeed, it may be entirely wrong to associate transvestism with homosexuality. One thinks of the impressive story of the Chevalier d’Eon, diplomatic representative of Louis XV in England. A valiant military man and notably skilled fencer, he eventually decided, on ...”

“... of stories in print. While the loveless world (and death-throes of a class) which they describe may not be to everybody’s taste, it is bizarre that du Maurier should have been dismissed as a lightweight romancer for girls. In an eye-opening final chapter, Auerbach puts the blame on the screen adaptations. Most people will only know her work from the ...”

“... the rotor arm from the distributor, were liable to find their tyres deflated by the police. It may be that the scriptwriters of Dad’s Army missed a few tricks. Why did we not see Mainwaring’s men, like the people of Margate, filling their bathing cabins with sand to use as roadblocks? Why did we never see them (or did we?) trying out the recommended ...”

“... been preserved. The argument hinged on the question of what limits there should be to what rulers may do to their people in the name of the national interest. The legalist faction argued that profits from the salt and iron duties were essential to the state’s survival against its external enemies. The Confucian faction replied that wise, benign rule and ...”

“... late 1930s, the latter in the late 1940s. By the time the Mandate reached its inglorious end in May 1948, there was precious little goodwill left towards Britain on either side of the divide. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations passed a resolution for partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish, but with an international ...”

“... surveillance’, as John Parker calls it. Yet it mattered little – Atta’s driver’s licence may not have been in order but there were some 200,000 outstanding traffic warrants in Broward County. The attacks of 11 September both reinforced and exploded the fashionable myth that the US has become a place where the Internet knows everyone’s secrets and ...”

“... single proposition to be made which was ‘not deceitful, and the tying our reason too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet ...”

“... Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems. But it may be too broad. Forster explicitly includes, alongside Emma and the rest of the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress ...”

“... about people in the world outside Africa and, indeed, about himself? There are at least as many may-have-beens in her account of Leo Africanus as there were in her retelling of the story of Martin Guerre. Most of what we know about his life and attitudes comes from The Description of Africa. One of the most interesting features of the book, to which ...”