“... with Adams are also quite revealing. As an uncompromising Republican – however suspicious he may have been of direct democracy – Adams disdained ‘Franklinian politicks’. Since Franklin was popular at Versailles, Adams reasoned quite logically that he had to be corrupt, secretly, just as the French were, openly. But because Adams was a genuine ...”

“... It’s a sorry, sour performance: not to be read by nostalgic Chelsea fans until after 17 ...”

“... full of mundane matter,    like conversation, in which news and wit    and Essays upon Woman may all fit; where metre and rhyme-pattern make a frame     wherein the voice can have and feel at home.                           A Reply to Intercepted Mail (1979) All this is as nothing, however, beside what Armitage and Maxwell ...”

“... bought one of the countless contemporary books that tell you what your dreams mean: not what they may reveal about your past or your soul, but what they predict about your future. The pervasiveness of such oneirokrites, or dream interpretations, in Greece represents both a continuity with the past and the country’s essential doubleness: they are a ...”

“... it back and the other half throwing it up. This leaves Belfast facing a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never enjoyed a good press (although Joyce, oddly, claimed to like it). As hardened a traveller as Paul Theroux emerged wild-eyed and spluttering: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city ... demented and sick ... a ...”

“... crag in Crete with oregano and goat smells in the air. And home? Where is it now? The olive grove may well be levelled under folds of tar. The wooden house made joyful with a stove has gone the way of Tsar and samovar. The small house with 8 people to a room with no privacy for quiet thought or sex bulldozed in the island’s tourist boom to make way for Big ...”

“... the weak, and Moore’s characters use it in precisely that defeated spirit. So though the reader may cringe when yet another of Moore’s long-suffering women cries, ‘Did God have her mixed up with someone else? Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job. I have never been your true and faithful servant,’ the heavy-handedness of the punning ...”

“... of the string, and rules that are probabilistic in character (so that what you get at each stage may depend on the outcome of a random process). As Stewart points out, the more complicated L-systems have been very successful in generating computer images of mature plants and of the stages through which they grow. So what? How are these formal games relevant ...”

“... hypothesis,/The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss/Such notions ... ’ The plain shrewd Briton may well feel a drowsy numbness when faced with a sentence like this: ‘Gout also appealed to the rhetorical frame of mind, tapped into its already acculturated versions of analogy and personification by creating a new discourse of the fallen.’ But it is not ...”

“... water, when he spots me: a clerk, my long-absent next-door neighbour. He says, as he sits, ‘Tom, may I join you?’ I say, ‘If you must.’ He says, ‘You probably noticed that I separated from my wife.’ I say, ‘I never noticed.’ He says, ‘The bone in her throat was, I rolled over in bed and hit her.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He says, ‘It was ...”

“... be thought to be making a fashion statement. I won’t do it, though. Adjustment and freedom may have trouble getting on with each other: what David Reisman seems not to have known is that autonomy can be quite pointless as well as quite ...”

“... with the nature of language per se (regardless of what individual theorists of language may originally have intended), but, again, with concepts – with organising sets of ideas at work in history which are distinguishable by their leading terms. Discourses direct the attention of historians to what ‘history’ (reuniting both senses of the ...”

“... book she is given Juliet Mitchell’s The Woman Question and for a moment it seems as if Mitchell may descend like a dea ex machina, an anti-Princess Margaret, to make all right. Alas, our last glimpse of Tennant, in February 1969, when she is in hospital having just given birth, is not promising. There are no coloured ribbons on the crib. She tells the ...”

“... but rarely displayed in non-avant-garde novels). There is some play with the idea that a person may do the work of Fate by shaping her intention to conform with it, a point Augustine would have been willing to discuss. Indeed, there is evidence that the whole business of narrative, of the nature and purpose of plotting, and of the interaction between the ...”

“... of Fraser gratefully remembered the Holroyd family: ‘Its upper-class lightheartedness and devil-may-care attitude was in such contrast to my own background.’ So, no doubt, their behaviour appeared to a clever foreign adult, but the boy, left to the care of a nurse and an aunt early disappointed in love, cannot have found it helpful. In one farcical ...”