“... It is still rumoured to be due to become a free settlement area. That means that ‘non-whites’ may under some new dispensation be able to purchase property here, which they do anyway in the hope that their stakes will eventually become legalised. Thus I can hardly get my car into the public street without eager buyers pitching me prices out of all ...”

“... although she tried with her tears to put out the fire that burned Zhang. Time and history may bring her into her own, though if she were to be translated, she would be the goddess, not of independence, but of consolation and compassion. As a writer, and a second-generation immigrant, Amy Tan wants to provide a fair hearing for the past, the present ...”

“... to see them again when she finished her book in 1988. Now things have changed, so perhaps she may revisit those lakes and forests after all. And if she does, she will find them less changed than the landscapes of Western Europe. The people, though, will be strangers speaking a strange language. There are not many Germans left in East Prussia (though ...”

“... Catullus as editor; it is unconvincing, to say the least. What of the fragments? The poems which may have been lost? Catullus’s works disappeared at some point in the late Classical period and were undiscovered until a parchment codex was found by Dante’s patron (putative but pleasing) at Verona in 1300. This copy could not have been made until (at the ...”

“... support the view that the court should remain exactly as it is: Byzantine and élitist though it may still seem, even after the reforms initiated by Lord Charteris when he was the Queen’s private secretary in the Sixties, Tomlinson disagrees, and then springs a surprise by waxing quite trumpet-tongued: The aura which surrounds Elizabeth’s person is not ...”

“... in the words of Lévi-Strauss, it only exists as ‘retrospective reconstruction’, the past may turn out to be a fictional as well as a foreign country. Thus history is both less than the past and, because it is translated into modern terms, more than the past. At the personal level, all our pasts are ‘history synthesised by the imagination and fixed ...”

“... Thackeray. It is crucial that the book, responsibly preoccupied with historical reality so that it may then be – in the terms of its subtitle – ‘A Vision’, should watch its own sense of fact: how else could it honourably report a debate between Father Cuthbert and Charles Bradlaugh on whether ‘Jesus Christ was an Historical Reality’? Father ...”

“... features – one relating to voicing and the other to place of articulation. The phoneme may be said to be a bundle of such distinctive features – ‘a complex, simultaneous construct of a set of concurrent units’. On the other hand, the syllable – a difficult concept that Jakobson does not define – is to be regarded as ‘a constructive ...”

“... triumph over the Forum Report has been to reduce any other dimensions or subtleties there may be in the document to this one insistent and well-publicised reiteration. All 11 months of talk, hearings and effort have boiled down to a single statement: ‘Only unity can stop the violence in Northern Ireland.’ In his interviews he has allowed for no ...”

“... be shaken if the youth of all the world gather in tents at Vienna next August. An unexpected voice may carry more weight. There has just appeared in the New York Review of Books an article emphasising the urgency of nuclear disarmament without delay. The writer is none other than George Kennan, the influential American diplomat who launched the policy of ...”

“... Bogart and go home with Paul Henreid. The people who are swept up into the world’s fantasy life may no longer be film stars, but they exist and they are vulnerable. Ask Yoko Ono. Nor has the demand for symbols of purity, even virginity, disappeared. Ask Lady Diana Spencer. The longing for idols does not change, nor does the pleasurable horror when they ...”

“... I write these entries in my diary over the Easter weekend. By the time they appear in print they may have turned out totally false. Such is the penalty of trying to foretell the future. An historian should have more sense. I add a couple of footnotes to what I suppose we should call the Falklands Crisis. The first is to do with the Labour Party. In recent ...”

“... philosophers like David Armstrong and Donald Davidson, who identify mental with neural events. I may add that although the acceptance of physicalism, in one form or another, is widespread among contemporary philosophers, with some notable exceptions, such as that of Karl Popper, I myself have still not been converted to it. Koestler’s most ambitious work ...”

“... with the conspicuous omission of child care. As a result, today’s housewife with young children may well be cut off from the community of other women, who can and do go out to work. Primitive domestic work, at the peat hag or furse bush, the well or the stream, had a social dimension which has today been largely ...”

“... has a quite different relation to reality. The well-known line from Duck Soup comes to mind. ‘He may talk like an idiot,’ Groucho says of Chico, ‘and look like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.’ Aladeen is an idiot of one kind – shrewd, ignorant, energetic – and his double is of a different kind, like someone imported ...”