“... forgotten – such public utterances of the composer’s as his notorious Pravda article of 31 May 1964, in which 12-tone and serial music were devaluated in terms which no Stalin, no Zhdanov could have improved upon: the tone-row ‘was one or the great evils of 20th-century art’. And come to look for it, there is not a word about dodecaphony in the ...”

“... which he finds in Victorian Liberalism will obviously not be to everyone’s taste. Some may find the Gladstonian view of politics too optimistic altogether. But it gets a good airing here, and one which shows the subject to be full of interest and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by reporting their blisters and their ennui: though interestingly they also deploy a wider variety of fiction-based techniques to convey that truth (this used to be called ‘making it up’). And as they press themselves upon us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... manager that drives them mad. It’s going on television that really does it. Perhaps, then, we may modestly envision a quieter role for the England manager of the future: more cloistered, more thoughtful, more bookish. Under no circumstances, however, should the Boss be left alone with Desmond Morris’s new work: he would almost certainly go mad, or else ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... likely to concede a victory to Reagan’s ‘new globalist’ policy. The poor suffering Angolans may therefore have to wait until there is a new incumbent in the White House and the pendulum of American foreign policy once again begins to swing away from the idea of America as the world’s ...”

“... story of actual crime, but a work of literary fiction.’ Dismissing the work, he says that ‘we may be interested by the spectacle of life imitating bad art, but not by bad art (i.e. over-familiar, exhausted conventions) proposing to imitate life.’ But his review of the matter confounds virtually every critical issue raised by ...”

“... duo with Judith Jamison, choreographed by Alvin Ailey) to Robbins, Tharp and Karole Armitage. He may, on occasion, have been abused or misused by his choreographers. But ultimately it is not possible to abuse him. Even when the role is not right, he is always more than the role. He is, almost literally, a transcendent dancer. Which is what dance strives to ...”