“... and left to resonate. The ‘wild name’ is flesh, and heavy. Blackburn speculates on how he may have felt, but her book contains none of the amateur psychology that is the stuff of more conventional biography. Instead she illuminates her subject’s state of mind by exploring the furnishings of her own. Napoleon’s dreadful situation reminds her of an ...”

“... Arnaud refers vaguely to possible leprosy, elephantiasis or ‘granulatosis’, whatever that may be. He observes that it was probably not a venereal disease, but Chamfort and his friends evidently thought that it was, and he struck a new pose as a sensitive pessimist and misanthrope wounded by Cupid’s careless arrow. He did not exactly give up sex, but ...”

“... curious thing is that even automation, from which it derives, only showed its face in 1948. (You may have thought you saw the word earlier, in the 1669 edition of S. Patrick’s Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men, but that, cackles the OED, was just ‘a misprint for automaton’.) And how did we manage to do without tee-off, given that golfing ...”

“... of probabilities reflects the balance of your knowledge and your ignorance. And very often it may not even be possible to alter that ratio of known to unknown, however the absolute amount of your knowledge grows: some systems are simply not mechanistic in a way that allows their changing states to be predicted. The famous example is ...”

“... now in a Bill put forward by an all-party commission, don’t become law. And it seems they may not. There was no big gathering at Oventic because the people are full of foreboding and out of patience. The Government has stalled for months, concerned with a more pressing war within the decaying PRI itself: as right and left opposition groups gain ground ...”

“... he regards travel-writing as ‘a minor form of autobiography’. Writers like Norman Lewis may travel the world invisibly and unselfconsciously, their subject and destination the lives of others to the specific exclusion of their own, but Theroux’s journeys are ultimately only his own. In The Pillars of Hercules, moreover, the preponderance of ...”

“... and I am afraid they will have to take me away – so please forgive me – all those I love and may God forgive me too, but I cannot bear the agony and it is best for everyone this way. The future is just old age and pain ...”

“... My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a frail reader trying to manage it in bed – but a remarkable narrative, animated by an enormous will to do justice to its continental subject. My First university job after graduating in New Zealand was a lectureship in Armidale on the northern ...”

“... which merit exploration for the light they throw on the history of the body, on the way we may change its history and hence change ourselves, and hence initiate further changes. But phrases such as ‘the 18th-century body’ or ‘the objectified body’ are as yet, save the mark, only figures of speech. They relate to perceptions, not functions, and ...”

“... and double-standardism of which Desowitz indicts the ‘lords of human kind’ in the North may be misguided: on one projection of the greenhouse effect, temperate climates will turn subtropical and the mosquito will be drawn into the British Isles with a future average temperature of 81.5 degrees F in London. Britain’s capital will in the foreseeable ...”

“... a year in Delhi alone according to Elisabeth Bumiller in her classic study of Indian women, May you be the mother of a hundred sons – that they now form part of that canonical catalogue of Indian horrors that foreigners living here try not to dwell on too much as they go about their generally very pleasant business. (On the other hand, it must be ...”

“... which are represented as differences of value, but what do they amount to? They depend upon what may be another act of faith on Berger’s part: that he can tell the difference between the work a painting does and the work we do on it. The ‘beyond’ of the paintings he most admires is celebrated in a language of the spiritual and of the sacred; they ...”

“... to scare the electorate about the results of Labour’s tax plans if they gained office. And it may have paid off. Labour had been in the lead according to the polls from the beginning of the campaign, but the final polls indicated that the Tories were catching up. It was all remarkably reminiscent of the 1970 Election, when Labour had been in the lead ...”

“... rent she had previously refused. Afterwards she asked: ‘Are you angry?’ ‘I’m not now but I may be later,’ I replied. Janet caused the same waves and frictions after her death that she had caused in life. She did not leave any will or last wishes. There were arguments about her memorial services both in England and in New York. Some of her Jewish ...”

“... the Guardian and Granada journalists looked glum. The former MP (he lost his safe seat in the May landslide) was lying all right, but he was lying with such charm, verve and enthusiasm that he looked and sounded like a winner. The case seemed lost. The dramatic story of how Aitken was finally defeated by his own lies is superbly set out in the final ...”