“... of its larger plot, which is what Ford Madox Ford arranged. Ford was a Catholic of sorts, but it may be that it takes writers of more profound or more extreme religious conviction to express the relation of the human and the supernatural plots. Such writers were the subject, some thirty years ago, of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross, and anybody who ...”

“... there for 21 years. Thornton asks us to regard him simply as a morphine addict. Freud and Cocaine may be inspired by concern for drug-damage, for the failures of ‘permissiveness’. It certainly has it in for Charcot, Freud, Marcuse, Timothy Leary. At times, it can look like medical history as penned by Kingsley Amis, and I suspect it of a harmless, if ...”

“... even the most reflective Americans to think in anything but liberal terms (however ingenious they may be, as Louis Hartz once so cleverly showed, in deploying those terms), it is a view which continues to haunt them. Perhaps Tocqueville was right? Perhaps it really is the case that the most nearly liberal society is one in which the promise of such a society ...”

“... class in the political struggle for its own emancipation. Cohen anticipates that his own position may meet with criticisms of this kind. The assertion of the primacy of productive forces is, he notes, considered demeaning to humanity… Those who take this line stigmatise the thesis as ‘technological determinism’, and complain that it presents machinery ...”

“... projects and less on public-sector wage claims. This relative convergence of opinion may break apart again if Michael Heseltine or his busload of City gents fail to find sufficient sovereigns to spare from their pots of gold. The temporary consensus against arming the Police with water cannons, CS gas and rubber bullets ...”

“... nothing about them, because we learn almost nothing about Richards either. This glazed reticence may, however, tell us something in itself, especially if it is viewed as part and parcel of the public persona of the man in the middle of the Modern Movement. At this point, let me lay my own credentials on the table, since what follows stems in part from my own ...”

“... will begin to be adopted by the end of the century; and a common foreign and security policy may in time lead to a common European defence. No wonder, perhaps, that die-hards in Britain blanched at the Maastricht agreement – and that the British Government came home brandishing its two ‘opt-out’ clauses, one on the common currency, the other on the ...”

“... penis) Cixous understands the myth as a story about both male fears and the dangerous results they may have for women. Medusa’s decapitation is seen as an effect, not a symbol of castration anxiety. As a post-Lacanian, Cixous maintains an arch ambivalence about the epistemological status of all psychoanalytical theory – hers included. Her real interest ...”

“... on this issue, no doubt, as feminists did on the other one. The food in the head industry may be an insult to the Third World, but it also encourages contribution to aid programmes. No longer guilty about sex, we are uneasy about anorexia and bulimia, slimness and fatness, soft foodie dreaming ... Vice may pay its ...”

“... goal had been achieved by, dare we say, a Leap of Faith. The clips of Beckham’s sending-off may well have staying power. I doubt it, though. Already the forces of forgiveness are rallying on his behalf, as so they should be. In four years’ time, it will surely be thought of as bad form to highlight the lad’s callow petulance. Bad karma, too: in four ...”

“... are the House of France. Summon the Minister of the Interior of Gotha at once so that I personally may order these changes. The next year, the Almanach serenely carried two versions, one entitled ‘Edition for France – at his Imperial Majesty’s Request’ and the second ‘The Gotha – Correct in All Detail’. This stratagem was more than a temporary ...”

“... consist of ‘the usual captionless pictures of the government busy at work’. The mise-en-scène may be modest science fiction, but the mode is self-conscious post-Chandler noir. The narrator is Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heel private eye – the ‘I’ in this case standing not for ‘investigator’ but ‘inquisitor’ – with low karma, less cash and an ...”

“... about which we know a great deal, from documentary evidence and living informants. His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon ...”

“... matter. ‘We cannot afford to have our attention deflected by any other issue, important as it may be,’ Jeff Halper, of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, wrote in a recent manifesto. ‘It is either a just and viable solution now or apartheid now . . . the next three to six months will tell.’ But Halper’s warning is odd in two ...”

“... be negotiated in the act of reading.’ The gap between the speech of Jesus and Thomas’s reply may look like a pretty good instance of a gap that needs filling; and of course practically everybody, including the painters and their patrons, the priests and their flocks, has been filling it for centuries. But now it seems they were wrong. Applying himself to ...”