“... to dismantle an entire category of weaponry. The abrupt end of the Cold War, paradoxically, may be the reason, for with attention focused on the collapse of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and ultimately the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, arms control came to seem mundane, even irrelevant. The sense of ...”

“... College, London: the women’s drab and pokey, the men’s predictably well-appointed. She may have been just as unworldly and out of touch as Watson’s cruelly depicted victim. The same story can of course be told of women in the arts and humanities. But there are significant differences. The bare minimum for women in the arts is a good library and a ...”

“... impudence, Conrad refuses to disfigure his text with a single footnote, even if some readers may feel that he wears his learning too lightly. Unlike some avant-garde works of art, this book erases all traces of the labour which produced it. What is worrying, however, is less the absence of footnotes than of original thought. Conrad’s general ideas ...”

“... Capote have severely diminished even as the reputation of O’Connor has steadily risen. McCullers may be perceived in some quarters as a writer of young adult classics whose work has not transcended its era; Capote is little read except for his atypical In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer ...”

“... by European standards, Rahnema is reluctant to use it. As a result, readers of the English life may be baffled to know quite why Ali Shari‘ati inspired such affection. Nor will they know what it was like to have Savak living in your pocket year in year out. Let me quote a short passage to give the book’s flavour: When the Doctor came back from his ...”

“... his fingers into a knot in irritation at being in the wrong place at the right time, I, who may just possibly be the model for his least important character, have assimilated his most important character to myself. Michael Holme hovers between us, made up of bits of Vikram Seth and bits of me. There are fortuitous factual parallels between me and ...”

“... his lust to love.’ This could have been adapted as a mission statement for Mills and Boon. There may have been stories in which a righteous male tamed the lusts of an over-sexed woman, but I have not come across them. Charles Boon laid down basic rules for authors. A happy ending was essential, which meant marriage or the promise of it. Stories were to be ...”

“... partly because the heterosexual males of that country pay attention to women’s clothes, and she may have been a bit too soft on our awkward but admirable ally, Charles de Gaulle. This peccadillo cannot fairly be compared with Unity addressing two hundred thousand Nazis at Hesselberg, alongside Streicher, and telling them: ‘I want everyone to know that I ...”

“... anger, his intellect and his extravagance of personality – Kinnock seems to lack entirely, which may be why he is leader of the Labour Party while Bevan never was, since they are, severally and still more in combination, precisely the qualities the British Labour Party most distrusts. Bevan’s anger, originally against the capitalist system and those who ...”

“... powder dry and prepare for a prolonged siege. Although monetarist economists and cost accountants may feel reasonably safe, Norman Tebbit has recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social sciences has involved the once-mighty Social Science Research Council in ...”

“... Shaw had observed only a harmless drudge, Mr Laurence sees ‘an exacting science’, a work that may be ‘treated artfully’, and the culmination (like an elevation to the peerage) of a lifetime’s achievement. It was nevertheless Shaw’s blindness to the beauties of bibliography that opened the way for Mr Laurence’s magnum opus. Shaw’s dislike of ...”

“... on both sides. Moreover, the assumption that people have a general model of the world, while it may be true, is hardly the kind of simplifying assumption that one expects from a scientific theory. If by ‘a mental model of the world’ one means the whole of an individual’s personal knowledge, then that would seem to be the thing to be explained, not the ...”

“... Government’s Indian commitment with such indecent and tragic haste in 1947. For this Churchill may be thought to have had nobody to blame but himself, for without his patronage it is questionable whether Mountbatten would ever have risen above Commodore. As Ziegler describes, he was a disastrous flotilla captain, without the meanest grasp of strategy or ...”

“... of others, rightly belong to me.’ It is true that ‘Nathan’ is a very potent name. To some it may suggest Guys and Dolls, with good old reliable Nathan Detroit who runs the oldest-established permanent floating crap game in New York; or it might recall Lessing’s play, Nathan the Wise, about the good Jew making peace between Muslim and Christian in the ...”

“... when they believe intervention will advance their interests. The norms of international behaviour may induce them to create political or rhetorical artifices to disguise their real intentions: but those norms do not often seem to alter behaviour. A case in point is a recent speech by Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger outlining the circumstances that ...”