“... universally accepted by mankind.’ ‘Personality’, the narrator suggests in The Great Gatsby, may be ‘an unbroken series of successful gestures’. It’s a wrong-headed and self-punishing proposition. Both Gatsby and The Last Tycoon are novels which dream of such a personality, but they tell us finally, as Fitzgerald’s life does, that personality can ...”

“... Shankill to bomb the innocent. He offered his sympathies to the injured, and the bereaved. ‘They may not want to accept them, and I understand that.’ I looked for the priest but I couldn’t see him. And then I could: over the heads of Mr McAllister and the people gathered at the grave, an elderly-looking man in a mackintosh was walking through the lines ...”

“... two most successful nations of the 20th century would be East Germany and the Soviet Union. Long may both rest in ...”

“... and patient enough to understand that there are many secrets these frayed and crumbling Scrolls may never ...”

“... are the only ones who have a vision: all the other players have merely reactive roles. The vision may be unwholesome, but it is pursued with such determination and willpower that the UN military are left gasping with unconscious admiration. Most of the military here are Nato officers trained to fight the Russians in Europe. Now they find themselves observers ...”

“... Imperial University, Infectious Disease Research Laboratory, Tokyo etc’ Extraordinary though it may seem, the activities of Unit 731 (and related outfits) were virtually unknown to most Japanese at least until 1976, when a Japanese television documentary was made on the subject. And the cat was only truly let out of the bag in 1982, with the publication of ...”

“... The first four went, on a six-month temporary transfer, in July. The timing of the second batch may have been cack-handed, but the transfers were nothing to do with the ceasefire. How difficult would it have been to check the facts? Could the Guardian leader-writer not have consulted the reporter on his own paper who had first written about the transfers on ...”

“... both been contested in recent times. First came a challenge to the notion of portrayal. Viewers may delight in the depiction of people and objects, but, so a new interpretation went, we were really meant to attend to the moral instruction offered. What you see is not what you ought to get. Is Dutch culture and its art a balancing act: the bountiful returns ...”

“... When the dopey President recognises his own situation as ‘just like Catch-22’, Heller may be (I hope) commenting not only on his own fame but on something like the taming of absurdity. ‘I can’t appoint a chief justice until I’m the President, and he can’t swear me in until I appoint him. Isn’t that a Catch-22?’ The person asked the ...”

“... Golden Lane where the cows were kept in the back of the premises, under roof. (Fresh the product may have been, but not necessarily pure. Jackson mentions the water pumps that were kept in cow yards to dilute the milk.) Scharf was particularly engrossed by the grand-scale demolition and building projects which, once the nation had recovered its prosperity ...”

“... influence on public perception of the novel; because if it continues to increase in power it may well end up Thatcherishly producing two nations of novelists; and because it distracts novelists from their novels (it’s hard to realise, after the caravan has passed, that your book is just as good or just as bad as it was before it made the baggage-camel ...”

“... and the affairs of the whole network of German, Danish, Greek and Yugoslav princelings: but others may find the accumulation of royal trivia at times a bit much. It is a long book. She has been criticised for devoting too much space to the Abdication and the Duke of Windsor. On the contrary, her emphasis here is fully justified: his brother’s abdication was ...”

“... Watsonville is at the head of the most productive vegetable-growing area in the world. Between May and October each year, as the mists roll in from the Pacific, the area produces about 80 per cent of the fresh vegetables consumed in the United States. But for the past ten years, as the seasons passed by, economic pressures have been building towards ...”

“... interest in Spinoza – as witness Stuart Hampshire’s clear and thoughtful guide – the reasons may be somewhat special. Leo Strauss’s doctrines of reading and interpretation are now under intense debate in American political theory and moral philosophy. These doctrines appear (Strauss himself was aware of this) to apply with particular provocation to the ...”

“... of cultural formation and deformation, then the question arises as to what relationship may obtain between these two features of the social body. In William Lafleur’s paper on the idea of the hungry ghost in Medieval Japan, this is the point of primary interest. The figure of the hungry ghost is a leitmotif in many Medieval Japanese scrolls. The ...”