“... Any garment can be placed somewhere along the gradient between the two. The carapace is stiff; it may have curves, but they will not be caused by the fabric’s resting passively on the body’s surface. A modern leader-of-the-nation’s lounge suit, Queen Elizabeth I’s pearl-embroidered dresses, the padded jackets and breeches of her courtiers – all ...”

“... to be indicted more than any man that hath been brought to the bar this day ... Mr Justice May: Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ... The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a mark on you ... The Mayor: I will cut his nose ... This did not sufficiently strengthen the jury, so they were hauled off to prison for the failure to ...”

“... flogged.’ Never mind that the modern house is a rarity even in the United States – ‘there may be two in town’ – or that the truly modern interior only turns up with any frequency in ‘watch the rich’ magazines. It is the ‘backyard barbecue’ and not the back-breaking Wassily chair which is ubiquitous. But the well-rehearsed sense of threat ...”

“... respond that Herbert went into the church only after his worldly career had stalled. That too may be an overstatement, since Herbert seems to have been moving toward the ministry for some years before he took orders in 1630. He was ordained deacon in 1624, and in 1626 received non-residential church appointments as canon of Lincoln Cathedral and ...”

“... to be inaccurate or misleading, or both. Adequacy would be the issue, not official sanction. There may be heated debates among Kafka scholars, or among his translators, but they would not have the kind of charge that Freud translation seems to have. What could it be about Freud as a writer that can get people so worked up about translation; and worked up in a ...”

“... 12 million (roughly the same as Coronation Street today). In retrospect and on paper his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m ...”

“... It seems​ no more than a moment since the recent commemorations of May 1968 – fifty up – were superseded by the anniversary of the June Days in Paris in 1848. No celebrations or hand-wringings for that brief, explosive insurrection, a few days after the summer solstice 170 years ago. The uprising was triggered by the closure of a job-creation scheme set up under the provisional government of the day ...”

“... In his long-awaited book Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf,* Peter Mansfield may unwittingly have written an obituary for the Amirate, so suddenly and unexpectedly overrun by Iraq on 2 August. Like most obituaries, it concentrates on the positive aspects of this small and vulnerable city state. As with most obituaries, the shortcomings of the Principality are largely placed on one side in favour of an intensely personal and very English reminiscence of ‘this remarkable little state ...”

“... rubber-stamp showing that the book went to war with the troops of fifty years ago. Such searches may soon be unnecessary. In 1988 Carcanet reissued The Crystal Cabinet. Mary Butts’s account of her life as a child and girl in South Dorset. And now, also from Carcanet, we have these stories, which first appeared in the magazines and journals of the Twenties ...”

“... designed to keep us out, to resist recognition; and the lines of its knobs and bluffs and ridges may be deciphered only by those who have been born and bred amongst them. For the rest of us they are edged but also obscured by lovingly named plants, by smilax, trillium, scuppernog vines and plum thickets. And the birds in their midst, the towhees, the ...”

“... community in New Guinea where males are put through a nine-stage initiation, and adepts may qualify for a further three-stage ritual which, if completed, will confirm the supplicant as a senior elder, privy to knowledge of Afek, the ancestral being. Preliminary phases of sensory deprivation and exclusion from normal society are central elements of ...”

“... themselves about. After all, they already know all the interesting things about genetics, and soon may even understand something about evolution and animal behaviour. There is, however, a secret about modern biology: its fundamental obligation – to describe the living world – has been almost forgotten. Physics knows the exact weight of the electron and the ...”

“... has long been recognised. If I say ‘I’m tired,’ and you say ‘I’m tired,’ then I may have said something true and you something false, so that we can’t have said ‘exactly the same thing’. But we can attribute a constant conventional significance to words like ‘I’ (and ‘now’ and ‘that cat’) even though they are used to ...”

“... in Vietnam who were drug addicts, the many Russians who are alcoholics. Just as a neurosis may be not merely the symptom of an illness but also, in itself, an attempt to cure that illness, so the drop-outs from our society, whose symptoms are covered by what I call paganism, may, consciously or unconsciously, be both ...”

“... the dragon who waylays the Christian soul. Auden’s flatness here (‘The unpredictable often may/Have sad and cruel results ... ’) is redeemed mainly by his use of something resembling the original alliteration (‘But the same maiden maddened them both ... ’). Together with the extreme grammatical simplicity, this gives the whole translation a kind ...”