“... her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole. She was the improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature. She could have ...”

“... philosophy’ rather than as a bisexual nymphomaniac who went gaga. He also suggests that they may turn her into ‘a role model for young women today’. A prospect that, on reading them, seems neither likely nor at all desirable. Perhaps the greatest myth about Murdoch that both these books inadvertently explode is the fact often restated by her many ...”

“... A blatantly rigged electoral mechanism is not a cause for celebration; whatever else it may be, this is clearly not a representative democracy. Ed Miliband resigned immediately as leader following his defeat and the caretaker leader, Harriet Harman, decided not to oppose the Tories on the basic tenets of their austerity policies: she knew that a ...”

“... open a new way of living, a new way of thinking about the world? A sage and treasure Jane Schwartz may well be, but really, outplacement counselling is pretty much just another consoling fiction. Personality makeovers and sense of humour transplants can’t do much about a shrinking jobs market, which may be one reason ...”

“... For the first time I’m nervous flying to Belfast. It’s early morning, Friday 22 May, and radio reports tell of streams of voters heading to the polls. As I buy the Irish Times at the newstand in Terminal One, I catch sight of one of my graduate students – we nod and smile quickly. He’s flying to Cork to vote Yes ...”

“... core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time. Such, at any rate, is the theme of David Reisman’s two volumes of intellectual biography and analysis – the most careful and thought-provoking exegesis yet to appear. Crosland was a man of contradictions, as Reisman shows, a hedonist who was also a puritan, and so on. Perhaps the biggest ...”

“... whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily put it, ‘like the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine ...”

“... As General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, prepares to report to Congress on 15 September on the success of George Bush’s ‘surge’, Bush himself is trying hard to talk it up and to discredit the policy of withdrawal. In a speech on 22 August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, he resorted to the new and risky strategy of using the example of the US withdrawal from Vietnam to support his position on Iraq ...”

“... we have to conclude that in many men and women this amounts to a definite choice. The choice may exist on an unconscious level, but nevertheless it is still there. Why some people but not others are obsessed with the survival of their species is a fascinating question. I would suggest that it may be that, in times like ...”

“... to paint, her paintings becoming ever more distilled and intense. She wrote in a letter: ‘I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.’ In her work she showed no dependence on Rodin’s romantically charged, monumental style. Her paintings were usually very small, her focus narrow. She always knew what she ...”

“... Greek and Roman Rulers’.This in itself was not necessarily big news. The Swedish diplomat Johann David Åkerblad had already correctly deduced the signs for P and T in the hieroglyphic version of Ptolemy, suggesting that the lion stood for LO; the next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas Young ...”

“... too knowing or too perky among the native flora and fauna of his examples. Dennis Enright and David Rawlinson pass the test with flying colours, and their observations not only shed light on the topic but add their own quota of good things to the many they have selected. They are well aware of the possible drawbacks, and of the fact that friendship and ...”

“... career are the ones most likely to have been written about by previous writers. Mr Mackay may aim to restore unity to his study with his subtitle: ‘Intellectual Statesman’. Balfour was certainly intellectual and probably a statesman. But was he an ‘intellectual statesman’? If so, or indeed if not, what is an intellectual statesman? No clear ...”

“... to be processed”. I call those who accept this view of man and nature Turing’s men.’ David Bolter is a Classical scholar although he has a degree in computer science. He writes engagingly, encompassing the sweep of history right back to the Greeks. Computer technology is a curious combination of ancient and Western European technical ...”

“... candour, at least on so illustrious a level, it has lost none of its force. The application may be more subtle but the game’s the same. The disappearance of old cronies, even older brandies and cigars, has in no sense limited the scope for prime ministerial wiles. Indeed, the advent of television has led those set in authority over us to ever fresh ...”