“... Highbury becomes an impossible place to return to and, anyway, we all have to stay at home. It may be uncanny, even absurd, but we have discovered a clear connection between our sealed room and Emma’s Highbury. On appearances no two places on the face of the earth could be more different. Our room looks like an ‘installation’ by Beuys or a wrapped-up ...”

“... or a shell on the white strand’. Every change of tide erases the drawing or the legend. This may appear a small beginning for a play, but it is enough to sustain, especially in the two last scenes of In Sand, a powerful allegory of order and chaos; of knowledge and the trouble it has to contend ...”

“... Arabia, of course, it is important to preface all remarks with a personal disclaimer. The Saudis may officially be America’s friends and allies in the latest Gulf War but serious discussion quickly reveals their doubts. Mr Bush’s assertion that the ‘American way of life’ was at stake in the Gulf troubled the rulers of Kuwait as well as Saudi ...”

“... that he did not chance his arm, drop the spanner and risk living entirely by the pen. His readers may feel some doubt about this. Life at the Woolwich, eventually near the top of the organisation, very likely gave him certain satisfactions hardly accessible to the full-time writer. For example, we have here a description of his Augean struggles when the deeds ...”

“... genesis of all KS’s works to date and gives details of his global concert-giving activity. We may not be as aware of this in the UK now as we were twenty years ago. But he still circles the globe giving concerts almost incessantly. Oddly enough, the main centre for KS performance seems to be Milan, as each new instalment of his gigantic Opera cycle Licht ...”

“... hostile to the ‘voluntary’ or unsupervised contributions of individual investigators. He may have been, but Martin has chosen a bad argument to prove it. In 1589 Bacon wrote under official inspiration a piece against the Puritans, which Martin interprets as an attack on ‘voluntaryism’ in the Church. So far as I can see, this is what historians ...”

“... Japanese. When befriended by two sailors, almost the first thing that occurs to him is that they may want to eat him. There are scenes in the latter part of the book, when Jim is hallucinated by exhaustion and hunger, that owe a good deal to the author’s interest in Science Fiction. Typical of them are a sudden fall of hail after the defeated Japanese have ...”

“... was a genius at knowing the young pilots and airmen ... He was my mentor and guide, and if I may say so, almost my second sight in all the difficult tasks that came in future years ... The Flying Corps owed to this man much more than they know or think.’ Baring’s own account of these years, in Flying Corps Headquarters 1914-1918 (1920), is in many ...”

“... of candles in the newly reopened cathedral. Admirers of the earlier, Francophile Julian Barnes may regret that in his latest work (which was first published in Bulgaria) the author of Flaubert’s Parrot and Talking it over has shed his brilliance and dandyism to become a rather sombre recorder of his times. The greyness seems inherent in his ...”

“... lot of hungry ghosts – the ghosts, she tells us, of her novitiate training. Thus, soul-searching may be followed by soul-chewing. Before the 1960s, flagellation and hairshirts weren’t uncommon in convents; you had to sleep lying flat on your back, without sheets or pillows, and with blankets that went to the laundry once a year. You spent a lot of time on ...”

“... personalities, as temperaments – indeed, they hate each other’s fledgling identities – they may not be able to distinguish each other as separate physical entities. What Hume said of all of us – that we are mirrors to each other – was true for them, but with a bizarre inflection: where for us the gaze of the other confers on us our sense of ...”

“... however, makes good sense with the obsolete meaning of a moral or application ... Vaughan may have been impressed by the sight of a storm at sea under a reddish sky, and moralises thereon. There is no missing referent for ‘he’ and ‘his’: they refer to sea. Marsh’s proposed emendation has been accepted, but it is unnecessary, and Vaughan’s ...”

“... political and moral concerns in a larger framework of theoretical understanding. Such a programme may at present seem too abstract to be useful. Spinoza touches interests in contemporary philosophy at two principal points: first, in his theory of the mirroring relation between the activities of a person’s mind and the activities within his ...”

“... when it was new, those who grew up with it, and those who delight in it now for its period flavour may find it so for different reasons. Not that rooms with Duncan Grant prints, curtains patterned in some variation of amoeba and dart or chevron and dot, and Isokon furniture, were very common: the section on photojournalism makes that clear. It sensibly ...”

“... hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off.’ Nomads may be closer to the created world of God, but they are not a part of it. A nomad proper is a herdsman who moves his property through a sequence of pastures. He is tied to a most rigorous time-table and committed to the increase of his herds and his sons. It is ...”