“... months before. His was the classic ardour of the neophyte. It’s not out of the question that he may have been sincere. As André Gide once said, faith isn’t always the right faith. After 1944-5, Mitterrand even went in for left-wing ideas, while being quite ready to give them up again temporarily a few months later, when the opportunity came to get ...”

“... Office, this is by no means a triumphalist volume in celebration of the Conservative Party. It may indeed be the Left which has most to learn from it. The perspective it adopts is very much that of our own day, starting from the premise that the Tories have been in power for the last 16 years – and that this is broadly in keeping with their performance ...”

“... shall recall this much later in the novel, for the hermit is not what he seems ... He is, as you may have guessed, the great Sheikh of the Gomelez himself, who hopes to have found in Alphonse the mahdi who will lead an Islamic world conquest. Through the hermit, Alphonse is introduced to Pedro de Uzeda, a cabbalist, and invited to his castle. Here there is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Chevrolets and nursing homes, in bathtubs, on the interstates, in ERs, ORs, BMWs. And while it may be that we assign more equipment or more importance to deaths that create themselves in places marked by initials – ICU being somehow better than Greenbriar Convalescent Home – it is also true that the dead don’t care. In this way, the dead I bury and ...”

“... to the artist’s feelings or fantasies about particular women or woman in general. Picasso may be unremittingly macho in his life, but in his work, with rare exceptions, as in the period in the Thirties when he was obsessed with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter, his visual construction of gender is interestingly ambiguous. Throughout the time ...”

“... intensely affectionate relationships with young women. Ferguson suggests that the closest of these may have been with a maid, Lina Jacobsen, who, he reported, ‘sees to my needs with the greatest solicitation’. Jacobsen left behind no clues as to her views of her crusty employer, but the 27-year-old Emilie Bardach did, and Robert Ferguson has found her ...”

“... module countenances relations between minds and things-that-don’t-exist. It may be that only phenomena in the domain of the commonsense-psychology module exhibit this logical peculiarity; philosophers think so who hold that ‘intentionality’ is the mark of the mental. In similar spirit, Chomsky thinks that the grammatical structures ...”

“... taboos. It is difficult to believe that this, or anything else, escaped van Onselen’s notice. It may be that this world remained truly impenetrable, even to him, but it seems more likely that a wish to protect Kas may have stopped him writing about these matters. In the course of the 17 years that he spent researching and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... little more than half the life, and there are crowded years ahead, though it is possible they may be less interesting. Ray Monk’s much-admired biography of Wittgenstein made one feel, for a while at any rate, that the subject’s weird ascetic life and his philosophy, which he himself felt sure no one would understand, could be represented as 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 ...”

“... they approached the 1987 election, for the failure to break through in 1983 had been crucial. This may simply have been too cruel to accept, for there was no doubt that the old electoral order – the old mould, if you like – was fragile. The temptation to believe in the politics of One More Heave was understandable enough.Crewe and King have performed a ...”

“... 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 ...”