“... This is true. Few Westerners take account of Muslim resentment about the Crusades. In part this may be because only a small handful feel bitter about the Muslim conquest of Syria in the seventh century, of Spain in the eighth century and of the Balkans during the 15th and 16th centuries. History moves on. However, as Hillenbrand notes, it ‘is a strange ...”

“... look like resentment,’ adding: ‘I will be ingenuous enough to confess that something of this may be true.’ But it was also the first glimmering of a preference which in the next century would become a battle of the styles between the Gothic and the Classical. Already in the late 1740s a Gothic tinge was creeping over England, promoting sensibility ...”

“... for such judgments, are strangely reluctant to trespass into modern times. Remarkable as it may seem, the only broad-sweep history of molecular biology is by a journalist, Horace Judson. His Eighth Day of Creation (1979) gives a vivid sense of molecular biology as a community of researchers, each feeding ideas into a common pool and drawing sustenance ...”

“... is an ‘Oxford graduate’. Rosie works for Frendz magazine for just under a year and in May 1972 she and Marsha Rowe co-edit the first issue of Spare Rib. Rosie is now 21 and still impressed by names. She is ‘staggered when Germaine Greer arrives uninvited to her party’. ‘Uninvited’, she hastens to add, because she had been ‘too nervous to ...”

“... afterwards that she becomes Lessing enough to blame people for thinking Somers is not her: Some may think this is a detached way to write about Doris Lessing, as if I were not she, it is the name I am detached about. After all, it is the third name I’ve had: the first, Tayler, being my father’s; the second, Wisdom (now try that one on for size!), my ...”

“... of war. Bond recognises that there are social consequences, but goes into little detail. This may be a drawback for some ‘War and Society’ syllabuses, where the issue is still very much on the agenda. Feminist and socialist historians, recently, have been very active in denying any great significance to war in, say, bringing about any alleged ...”

“... a scarcity value, it is possible that early man drew it into his protective fold. Domestication may even represent the acceptance of a long-standing association between man and animal which was of mutual benefit. Undoubtedly, without domestication – ‘the greatest conservation movement of all time’, as David Harris has happily put it – sheep might ...”

“... loves dictionaries; he has himself edited, and contributed to, encyclopedic undertakings. He may therefore be interested to learn that he can be described as a personified dictionary entry – a simultaneous, crystal-clear definition of both meanings, and of each separate meaning, of the adjective ‘noble’. No member of the nobility mentioned in this ...”

“... fell off the pedestal on which we had placed him. It was our fault for putting him there. Whatever may have been true of the Crosland of the Fifties, the Crosland of the Seventies was no longer emotionally a Croslandite. The swashbuckling ex-paratrooper had settled down, politically as well as in his private life. We persisted in seeing him as our mentor, but ...”

“... a teacher and become a student at the feet of the Kenyan peasants and workers.’ In Europe this may read like posturing, but when Ngugi says it, it seems a natural and modest description of his politics. Petals of Blood, published three years ago, prepared the way for his detention by President Kenyatta: it is an ambitious novel which portrays post-colonial ...”

“... the selling of Louis XIV. Neither Apostolidès nor Marin says anything as crude as this, and they may not intend the implication, but the concepts themselves encourage us to think in these terms. Is this misleading or is it illuminating? A cynical interpretation of Pellisson would not be unreasonable. A Protestant turned Catholic, a client of the financier ...”

“... sensible food. Will Nicky try to seduce either of them? Will things get messy? Now read on ... We may feel we have met this clever-naif teenage narrator before, in the novels of J. D. Salinger, Denton Welch and Colin MacInnes. But the device is still successful; and Nicky is, in a surprising way, a prize ...”

“... But Hammett was constantly quarrelling with his father at this time, and such associations may have been a youthful response to a piece of family history: in 1896, Richard Hammett had ineptly switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in a vain attempt to contest a State election. Moreover, if Hammett was seriously connected with radicalism, it ...”

“... supplied (for the time) the unquestioned background. Car-nap’s ontological frameworks, which we may find it expedient to employ but of which it makes no sense to inquire whether or not they correspond to reality, have a comparable status. Finally Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, spoke of propositions which ‘have the form of empirical propositions’ but ...”

“... at any rate? The misinformation would seem to have been on Radji’s part. Two years later, in May 1978, when Radji is acknowledging (to himself) that torture had continued long after he had denied its existence, he is concerned with trying to discredit those who had been tortured. Even when cabling Tehran during the final collapse in November 1978, ‘to ...”