“... formal marriage into an illicit affair under pressure from foreign consumers and voters. Barclays may have sold its South African offspring at a bargain to Anglo-American, but the new company remains within the extended family. Do the different passports of its members really matter? When General Motors and IBM lend money to their South African management to ...”

“... after thousands of its denizens have died of Aids and as many as 70 per cent, it is now thought, may have contracted the disease. In its heyday in the early Seventies Castro was the cutting edge of the gay revolution, the place where thousands of young men (and some women) flocked from all over the country to enjoy a totally new kind of freedom. Gay ...”

“... Pistols. But Savage knows as well as everybody else that an awful lot of it wasn’t. The Slits may have started out as very young, rather posh, utterly unmusical Sex Pistols groupie-girls, but they had long, unspikey hair and unpunklike girly little frocks; their music was no garage-thrash drone but a vertiginously spare and reggae-like space filled with ...”

“... by the society that produced it, in terms of the roles, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that it may have played, of the conflicts implicit in individual works and of what they did and did not portray. The history of art cannot be the history of art alone. Well, no, but it is difficult to see here, or in the essays themselves, anything essential to this ...”

“... best. This has happened to the new British Library, which belongs stylistically to the Sixties and may not be fully functioning even in the mid-Nineties. Such effects, common to all arts, are emphasised in architecture. Buildings are unavoidably present; a book can go to the stacks for a generation but the ups and downs of a building’s reputation are ...”

“... his friend Sir Peter Bukton not to get married again without taking warning from the Wife of Bath may be one of Chaucer’s common self-simplifications, Pearsall still sees parts of Chaucer’s analysis of marriage as ‘unblinkingly hostile’, and perhaps – though this is approaching boundaries of speculation Pearsall will not cross – the result of the ...”

“... first huge volume ends at the 1946 Election, with JFK’s entire political career still ahead. One may doubt whether Hamilton will really get all that remains into what his publishers promise will be ‘a second and final volume’: he has secured the full co-operation of Mrs Onassis, is exploiting the resources of the JFK Presidential Library, and his earlier ...”

“... them work (and tenured jobs) for life. Other debts are so large that we forget them, though we may owe our sanity and working lives to childcare centres, equal-opportunity provisions, the means of controlling fertility – and underlying all that, the massive shift of consciousness to which Beauvoir contributed inestimably. Now, at least, those who assault ...”

“... since it implies an awareness of other places, even an anxiety about them, about the way Texas may look from a different region. Of course there’s boasting in the claim too, a pride in the fact that chainsaw massacres, for instance, don’t happen just anywhere. Since then the Coen brothers have given us a dusty South-West (Raising Arizona, 1987); an ...”

“... that if we had gone in at this time much of the succeeding agony would have been avoided. They may well be right. Sterling had emerged from its petro-currency status, inflation had been brought down, the UK was roughly at the same point in the trade cycle as its partners and the ERM had not yet effectively frozen its exchange rates. In practice, Lawson ...”

“... will be their funeral.’ Saro-Wiwa’s conviction that the pen is mightier than the goon squad may sound, to European and North American ears, like an echo from another age. In the era of the World Wide Web, books and newspapers are often dismissed as waning powers. But across much of Africa the certainty persists that writing can make things ...”

“... that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be the first novel to out-Gravity’s Rainbow Gravity’s Rainbow.If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders, in terms of sales. The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up ...”

“... well. I think that, if they are such gluttons for punishment as all that, they are past help. It may in fact have been Empson who by 1961 was past help – at only 55 he was already describing himself as an ‘old buffer’– for he was clearly unable to pick up the subtleties of intonation in Williams’s drawl in the way that he had instinctively been ...”

“... in 1655 – ‘The only thing I wish for is that you (who are more capable of it than anyone) may consider that task which Descartes started but did not finish, of strengthening our hopes of immortality’ – not realising that the gap between Hobbism and respectability was now too wide to be bridged by a joke. Another letter from Leibniz, which contains ...”

“... who came their way provide a Rorschach test of settler attitudes to Africans. Ethnopsychiatry may tell us very little about the mental life of Africans, mad or sane, but it reveals a good deal about the attitudes and the lives of the colonials. McCulloch has studied the records of the Mathari Mental Hospital, built in 1910, in Nairobi, which had ...”