“... return to the quotable James – she ‘never allows facts to make her uncomfortable’, and there may be much of fantasy in the autobiography. But in her account of her relationship with her mother there is a feeling of truth; and the story is consistent with her febrile pursuit of an ideal relationship in adulthood. Her mother eventually left Nohant for ...”

“... a cogent statement of empiricism would be like in any language other than English. This last claim may at first sight seem absurd to anyone who has read the sometimes witty and always rigorous exposition of logical positivist doctrine that appeared in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... achieves a ‘kind of revelation’ – but she is quick to dismiss any spiritual overtones that may occur in connection with that experience: ‘all I have wished to do was to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready-made values.’ Heroines thus programmed to fail or to succeed invite a rather ...”

“... decision to admit the Shah to the United States for medical treatment. The students themselves may well have been acting in this spirit until they, and Khomeini, realised how enormously popular the action was in the current wave of xenophobia. After Bazargan’s resignation, the liberals, including Khomeini’s rival protégés Sadeq Gotzbadeh and Abol ...”

“... refuses to surrender either her love or her understanding of the man she killed – hateful as he may have been. Nor is the truth of the case revealed by the clumsy investigations of the ‘LAW’ (Yglesias capitalises the word, possibly as an expression of authorial scorn; possibly as a reflection of Sally’s humility before male authority). It is only when ...”

“... a smuttily stammering diplomat, mistranslations (‘The Ministry of Strange Affairs’), which may start a giggle or a groan, as when we’re told yet again that Petworth, a visiting lecturer in linguistics, was ‘not a character in the world historical sense’. Jokes about women’s bodies ‘are quite outstanding, one immediately remarks it’ – when ...”

“... what anthropologists study is the particular knowledge which people in exotic cultures hold. This may be knowledge which takes the form of myth or ideas about plants and animals or about what characterises different types of men. This last type of knowledge, social knowledge often takes the form of kinship systems. For Lévi-Strauss social systems, and ...”

“... has not been Blanchot’s, but he salutes in Joubert a fellow-spirit. His reflection that oblivion may be denied to those who seek it, self-defeatingly, by bequeathing written memorials of themselves, is duplicitous to say the least. There is no obvious modesty in Blanchot’s withholding of himself from the world, but rather censure of our ingrained ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than frightening, a faint pastel copy of the object of Prince Myshkin’s intense interest. We may note, as Dmitri Nabokov does, that the lovable executioner foreshadows the jolly M’sieur Pierre of Invitation to a Beheading, and it is true that executions of various kinds loom large in Nabokov’s later work. It is their blandness and their bungling that ...”

“... of life in the intolerable Sertao (Cunha often looks at it this way). When the world is cruel you may pretend it’s about to end. But this is not all, for Vargas Llosa’s subsequent use of Eliot and Simone Weil gives us a clue to one special strength of The War of the End of the World. Where Cunha mostly invoked the language of science to explain Antonio ...”

“... on sixty days later. In August 1932, Stalin demanded heavy repression of political enemies, but in May 1933 ordered an end to mass arrests and the release of large numbers of political prisoners. It is not hard to imagine the effect of this confusion and poor preparation on local life. One unfortunate collective farm, cited by Conquest, began in early 1930 by ...”

“... wife, on his motive for travel, on his financial state, his dealings with Garrick, or whatever it may be – there is inevitably a tiny query hovering over the fictions which Sterne devised to cope with such issues. It is the biographer’s job to fix the fleeting, to freeze the volatile gases of personality; the better he is (Cash is pretty good, in this ...”