“... Fund for Population Activities. The expatriate’s lack of roots has haunted him. Even though he may owe to it much of his literary awareness and sensitivity, it formed an unstable and dangerous basis for embarking on Mrs Gandhi’s biography. He came to his subject with excessive commitment. This was not a matter of political allegiance shaped by a rough ...”

“... have no baby; they have decided they don’t want kids – not now and perhaps never. This may be why Fran is edgy over the invitation, and inclined to talk tartly about taking Bud and his wife a present. Perhaps they should take a bottle of wine, and drink it themselves if their hosts don’t like it. Fran eventually settles for a loaf of her ...”

“... the title page of his Orgelbuchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby”. That is what I would have liked to say about my work.’ After Wittgenstein’s death in Cambridge the small group of his friends gathered there were in doubt about the funeral arrangements. Finally Drury said: ‘I remember that ...”

“... met Charles’s sister Alice. They eventually returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical ...”

“... trading interest, who looked with sympathy on the Parliamentary cause after 1629 (though we may well doubt whether such a cause yet existed), we would expect him to look for evidence of this new alignment in the records of the one company where top City men sat side by side with some of the Parliamentary leaders: the East India Company. But these ...”

“... fall within that 10 per cent that is pathogenic. A ‘natural’ process that feels abnormal and may turn out to be so, labour provokes the unease and resentment of a story whose protagonist may turn out to be a victim. Our consumerist, scandal-sensitised, anti-institutional sensibility fights powerlessness with ...”

“... human situations, for they only permit us to discover what we already know, Here Bakhtin may seem to be making a point very similar to a common recent criticism of much Marxist or feminist criticism: that it is repetitious and sees the same thing in very different works. If we look more closely, however, we see that Bakhtin does more than this: by ...”

“... as he says, ‘whether capitalism is not final, and nation-states fated to become nominal’. He may be right. Nations, as states, have lost most of their room for manoeuvre in the transnationalisation of finance and investment that now affects them all. In the European Community, and in future imitations of that association elsewhere, nation-states will ...”

“... of George Eliot. That Isabel Archer’s idealism is Emersonian is indisputable, even if a reader may wonder why Henry James was so ungenerous when he wrote about Middlemarch. In retrospect, Poirier’s book on James seems largely a prelude to the much more powerful A World Elsewhere, which established its author’s critical importance. Subtitled ‘The ...”

“... Buchanan rides to rescue the most innocent children of all – the unborn. His opponent, Bob Dole, may have lost the use of an arm in the Second World War, but the New York Times explains that Dole ‘would be the oldest candidate ever elected to a first term as President and so cannot plausibly claim the vaunted mantle of outsider riding to the rescue’. A ...”

“... in the late 1870s. However complex and controversial his attitude to historic Jewry and Judaism may have been, however much his philhellenism and his attack on Christianity (as a noxious, concentrated progression from Judaism) informed his judgment of the historic place of Jews and their religion, he had nothing but contempt for the cheap demagogy of ...”

“... magazine or in one of his papers, and these comments filled me with a childish joy. He died on 24 May, of cancer, at the age of 87. Mitchell was born on 27 July 1908, in Fairmont, North Carolina, a small farming community interspersed with swamps and woods, fifty miles or so inland from the Atlantic Ocean. His father was a farmer and a tobacco and cotton ...”

“... the Jewish tribes of Medina and waged jihad against the Meccan polytheists. Though his campaigns may have been moderate by the standards of the day, the precedents remain, enshrined in the Qur’an and still usable by those modern Islamist ideologues who push aside centuries of qualifying scholarship with a dismissive sweep of the hand. Commenting on the ...”

“... affected their moral behaviour – particularly in its Fabian advocacy of free love. Other seeds may also have been planted by the work, in Britain and in Europe. Michael Foot is in sympathy with Patrick Parrinder’s reading of this crucial phase of Wells’s intellectual evolution. Their discourses, however, are markedly different. Foot’s style is ...”

“... the Beatles, they are post-Marxist in the sense that the Internet comes after the Somme. Hall may dislike trendy theories, but this is a bit like Jeffrey Bernard campaigning against drinking clubs. Whatever his reservations, he does stand for all the Right Things in the arena of cultural studies: impeccably ...”