“... turned down both this overture and the next, while remaining an admiring and respectful friend. It may, nevertheless, have been her memory of Paget’s demanding nature which caused her, in 1915, to attempt the rescue of the latest female recruit, Irene Cooper Willis, by introducing her to Bertrand Russell. Ottoline decided Irene could be more usefully ...”

“... their shared interests in sex, marriage and private life. It seems important to some that her work may have been performed with a chorus, rather than by a single singing voice (although then again, it may not have been; we don’t really know). Feminist scholars try to find in Sappho a vision of language and desire based not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Lévi-Strauss himself, who has said he was relieved when the fashion came to an abrupt end in May 1968. (A student slogan of the day proclaimed: ‘Structuralism does not go out into the streets.’) Yet with the gradual translation of his work into English, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation continued to grow in France and abroad, and as late as 1981, when the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... frights’ in the supermaxes, not only led the Iraq team appointed by the State Department in May and June 2003, but made a brief visit to Haiti after the overthrow of Aristide to oversee prison reform there. As Stewart (who at the time was running a security consulting firm in Phoenix called Advanced Correctional Management) put it: ‘We need some place ...”

“... that closely. The World Trade Center wasn’t just a landmark, lofty and awe-inspiring though it may have been, it marked the edge of south Manhattan. It defined the boundaries of our city selves. Some compared it unfavourably to the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. Others detested it as a symbol of unfettered free trade and private ...”

“... I know where Gopal Ghosh lives – we could go there.’ Of course, owning a Gopal Ghosh may not be owning a Picasso; but his paintings were held in high regard. Just as Pramathesh’s career as a chartered accountant and an employee was at the fledgling stage, so was the Indian art world, with its ambivalences and lack of ...”

“... would ever have had any colour at all. This seems inconsistent with the meaning of the word: there may be an independent metaphysical argument to show that gold is not yellow, but if it’s yellow now, it was yellow before there were any human beings and would have been yellow even if creatures with vision or living organisms were not among the possibilities ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”