“... is a disruption of the Western regime of names, genders and pronouns. The outline of the plot may be simply stated, though its capacity for generating complexity will also be apparent from the outset. A Japanese nobleman has two children, a boy and a girl. In their early years, these children start to adopt the demeanour and pastimes of the opposite ...”

“... were overthrown, it was only to be expected that its French counterpart, elected to power that May, would follow suit. The polarisation of French opinion which had given rise to the election of the Blum Government also precipitated the factory occupations of June 1936 and led the Centre and the Right to fear a revolution from below: the very same set of ...”

“... a low standard of living – unacceptable. In the UK at that time – happy days – there may have been shortages of food and clothing, but there was also an acute shortage of labour. The so-called ‘flood of immigration’ started, first from the Caribbean and then, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, from the sub-continent of India. The numbers ...”

“... imaginable – all-out nuclear war – is to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, then that threat may be considered in itself proportionate to the evil it is seeking to avert. It is obvious that for some places and for some purposes the deterrent works. The question is whether it will work indefinitely for all places and for all circumstances. Objections to ...”

“... of the very rich – Goldman chucks it all in, building and building so that in the end he may have the biggest target in the whole world to knock down all by himself. The book is already giving signs of being the product of an authorial megalomania poor Elvis could not have hoped to match. The mass-culture freaks of the world are evidently such ...”

“... there would be no reserves for use in other ways, such, presumably, as writing novels. Nowadays we may have got rid of deference, though expert friends assure me that degradation in erotic life has merely assumed different forms. What seems reasonably certain is that Gissing had it in something like the form outlined by Frend. When he was a student at ...”

“... public scandal of an action against West and Martin under the Official Secrets Act. Be that as it may, A Matter of Trust leaves behind it a disillusioning picture of counterintelligence work. The patient piecing-together of mosaics from scraps of information rendered only meagre results. Most of the big breaks came either from code-cracking by signals ...”

“... whereas in fiction they really do. The novel has come to feel guilty about this art (the guilt may even be the symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius ...”

“... Voice takes the form of a recapitulation of the main themes in reverse order. Such a structure may appear over-ingenious, when stated in this bald way. For it is only in the process of reading that we can take account both of the risk that Pinget runs, and of his success in guarding against it. ‘But the explanations after the event could only ...”

“... which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may be from what may not be characterised as “scientific” ’, and his illustrations of how such an apparatus can suddenly be cast aside, helps flesh out Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm’. One difference between Kuhn and ...”

“... and many passages read as if they are his rather cautious answers to Western interrogation. It may of course be that the CIA, having extracted information of the highest value in the course of his debriefing, insisted on virtually none of it being made public. Certainly Shevchenko was made to earn the American protection which he had requested. An ...”

“... of the street, Thanks to thy wisdom. Thou showest no favour no way. Adulterers (if they are poor) may be boiled in cauldrons. Officials abusing thy ordinances are always castrated. Indeed, thy benevolence Blesses the beasts in the fields, who press to the court, Bleating to be thy meat. The water buffalo Bellows thy name; the bees bring thee wax; the fish ...”

“... by major mutinies: some large towns were held by mutineers with local support for up to a week. In May 1949 two frontier battalions defected, with their officers, to the North. Meanwhile, guerrilla warfare broke out throughout much of the South, and was particularly strong on Cheju Island, off the south coast – the furthest point from North Korea. Cumings ...”

“... manoeuvres, he finally submitted his application for the ‘Habilitation’ at Heidelberg on 25 May 1918 (at the time of the final, apparently successful German breakthrough on the Western Front). It was not until December 1918, the very month of his conversion to Communism, that Lukacs received from Heidelberg the official letter rejecting his ...”

“... marrying Miss Florry Bryan, the Viceroy, Lord Landsdowne, communicated his disapprobation. Yet one may venture to think that his motives were not racial, as Ballhatchet suggests. In taking a working-class woman the Maharaja was marrying beneath him. In marrying her into a polygamous household he was creating a maharani to whom European ladies would need to ...”