“... even.’ If the book fails to deliver on its weightier promises, seldom rising above exotica, this may have to do with the constant sense we have that Hickman will not, after all, countenance risk or change to herself. Despite her blithely loopy ability to accommodate Mexican reality to the ready-made parameters of magical realism, she is far too sane for the ...”

“... up a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from salt and frozen drops of water. They may last for four hours or two days. Such lyrical yet precise descriptions are characteristic of Høeg’s half-Western, half-Inuit protagonist. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, Smilla has a mind of winter: or, as it states in her Danish police report, ‘anybody ...”

“... act, as they often do, as a means for a non-person to cling onto his identity. To be an individual may be the most coveted right of all. There is a particularly touching passage – this book is notable for its expert changes of tone – when Popov and a friend of his watch Brezhnev’s cortège entering Red Square. They feel themselves lucky to be so close ...”

“... his turf from raiders from outside. There are signs here and there, however, that things may be changing. Harvard has long run a very successful and high-powered history and literature programme for undergraduates, as does Oxford, which is also just embarking on a similar marriage of history and art history. The barriers between scientific ...”

“... his generation’ and terms like ‘Don Quixote’ have become labels almost universally used. He may be right, but it is worth remarking that Orwell’s friends took a different view of the obituary at the time. Almost every admiring phrase seems to contain its implicit qualification, so that Orwell was not just the conscience but the wintry conscience of ...”

“... explosion of happiness. Otherwise there doesn’t seem to be much happiness about, though that may be an impression created by her deadpan, sourpuss recording of events. Still, all that sex must have been fun as well as funny. It’s funny in a Feydeau way, by virtue of the quantity and speed of almost overlapping lays. Fidelity was neither expected nor ...”

“... stuff, and – if you accept that underdevelopment is a problem needing a solution – he may be fairly criticised for failing to provide his own answers, despite a half-hearted suggestion that aid be linked to human rights and curbs on military spending. Indeed, he is torn between his desire to see aid abolished and his desire to see it ...”

“... role to play. In Hitchcock innocence says, ‘I didn’t do it’; in McEwan it says, ‘I may have done it but you have to hear the whole story,’ or, ‘I did it, but only because I was ambushed by some stranger hiding in my personality, some other self I wasn’t prepared to meet.’ By Gothic I mean that moment in a fiction when all the emotions ...”

“... of, Hess was free on bail in West Germany, awaiting trial for espionage. His friend disappeared in May 1987. ‘In an isolated forest outside of Hanover,’ Stoll reports, ‘police found his charred bones next to a melted can of gasoline... No suicide note was found.’ In his own quiet way, Stoll becomes a hero. He is invited to give talks in Washington and ...”

“... of former colleagues around to point out mis-statements or lacunae. Mind you, this convention may be changing: one can imagine the kind of history of the Times of the 1980s Rupert Murdoch would be likely to commission, or pass. It is hard to see him frightened by the prospect of hostile reviews: ‘Murdoch Loses Sleep over Bias ...”

“... upon which, indeed, the whole metrical system, as Russom understands it, rests. His book may be criticised for confining itself largely to the evidence of Beowulf, and perhaps for questionable handling of ‘extrametrical syllables’. Yet his ‘coherent rule system’ is just that, and it will certainly have to be taken fully into account by all ...”

“... in the ordinary sense. What people make up about their parents and their childhood may – and often does – involve occasional early and late fantasies concerning adoption, members of the aristocracy surreptitiously making deals with those purporting to be one’s father and mother, lost siblings ... But more often there seems to be a subdued ...”

“... and later as a special military adviser to Boris Yeltsin. But revealing though these materials may have been, Lenin’s flaws were hardly invisible before access became possible. Volkogonov is quite candid about the main reason for his and others’ loss of faith in Lenin. ‘We began to doubt his infallibility above all because the “cause” which he ...”

“... with the trinkleting of Morris dancers; protesters at Fairmile had a pagan ‘Beltane’ bash at May Eve, a ripsnorter of a festival, with fire breathers, fire jugglers, the firing of an earth maze and puckish figures dancing – naked to be sure – around a bonfire to panpipes and drums. One grubby dancer, the thick end of a year’s dirt on him, dances ...”

“... some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The ...”