“... a man: an American man, that is – the Mexican men are mostly depicted as cowardly or cruel. One may suspect that McCarthy’s Mexico is the imagined space for juvenile manliness – as the advertisement for Taco Bell advises, he has made ‘a run for the Border’ – but it is also the setting for an idyll. For that is what All the Pretty Horses ...”

“... with a national past – both of which were stimulated by the emergencies of wartime – may have played in determining the unusually accessible nature of this sculpture is a task worthy of a sensitive and subtle historian. To assess how much of its appeal depends on the vulnerability of expression and tenderness of gesture – the former quality ...”

“... much a part of the language no-body pays attention to it anymore.’ Through Jonathan the reader may feel what it means to lose one’s bearings, to be made less than human. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides the Lisbon sisters have taken the American dream of a life unblemished by experience to its extreme. Their suicide is an escape and a ...”

“... believe in the existence of the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States may be surprised to learn from MacArthur that the United States borrowed these techniques of press censorship and the pool system from the Falklands War. As Lieutenant Commander and ‘public affairs specialist’ Arthur A. Humphries explained, ‘in spite of a ...”

“... stillness. And they do. And they do so without needing to evoke the transcendental, though they may. Their re-latedness to the northern Romantic tradition suggests that they might well be a counterpart to the Abstract Sublime in painting. But they do not aspire to the cosmic grandeur of Newman or the cosmic energy of Pollock or the cosmic pathos of ...”

“... Arrival in the 16th century is signalled by a mistiness of documentation, a mistiness which may be intended to convey the quality of dream. Jessica notices ‘humble working people’ and ‘magnificently dressed aristocrats’. On the Rialto she spots ‘shops of every description’ – shops which aren’t described. Celebrities figure ...”

“... if things develop the way things developed in Europe over the last forty or fifty years, this may beget a gradual emotional defusion. First of all, there will be the joy, the tremendous joy I saw on my grandfather’s face when Israel became a state. Then there will be the problem of the morning after and they will discover that their economy is ...”

“... In the essays local excellences often jostle for space with oracular utterances which may be commonplace or comic. Thus on Middlemarch she rewrites Wordsworth: ‘Defamiliarisation is a procedure of englamouring the humdrum.’ As it happens, the most successful essay is one which doesn’t really illustrate her thesis about non- or misreadings of ...”

“... on source criticism in the second half of the book, even the not-so-conventional historian may well remain uneasy about which parts of Canfora’s story of the library are drawn from ancient accounts and which are appropriate but still imaginary reconstructions. And there are still some hidden prejudices at work. Why, for example, does he so firmly ...”

“... encountered in the writing of the history of ideas are superbly controlled. (Similar praise may be given to the writings of J.W. Burrow, whose very different style of work in the history of the social sciences plays an important role in Stocking’s conceptualisation of his task.) The first is the use of a biographical mode of analysis, employed so that ...”

“... to by reviewers, with jokes, obscenities, fantasies, pseudo-scholarship. Foucault’s Pendulum may give the impression of being like that, but somehow triumphantly isn’t. For one thing, Eco’s scholarship (so far as I can guess) is real, however engagingly grotesque the uses he makes of it. We need a more seductive explanation, says Belbo at one ...”

“... Monday 14: Wrote and posted letters to Penny Durrell-Hope and Simon Callow. It seems possible we may see him and a preview of Ballad of the Sad Café when we go up to town to review art shows for TLS. Ordered four books from Bibliophile. Thursday 17: Early breakfast. Heard on radio: outbreak of hostilities in Gulf. Sudden US air attack on Saddam ...”

“... melancholy and forgiving, and never boring. The operative terms of the subtitle are key: the life may have been unedifying, but given the times in which that life had to be lived (and Rubenstein vividly reconstructs them) it is impossible to remain wholly unsympathetic. True, the laudable instinct for fair play does occasionally cross the line into ludicrous ...”

“... The discriminating literary critics from the NKVD who ransacked Mandelstam’s apartment in May 1934 agreed. Soon after Mandelstam’s arrest, Stalin phoned Pasternak and asked him whether Mandelstam was a ‘master’. As Coetzee explains, ‘we can be sure Stalin was not asking because he regarded great artists as above the state. What he meant was ...”

“... have other diplomatic interests in these countries, and if we alienate them over drugs, we may be sorry when we need them for something else a few years later.” ’ In 1984, Thailand, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Belize, Burma and Jamaica – all countries receiving US economic and other assistance – actually increased their drug-producing ...”