“... Austen’s cottage at Chawton notice that Jane’s sewing box is bigger than her writing box. It may have been the same with Hannah Crafts. Where had this manuscript been? Its early adventures are uncertain. Before 1948 it seems to have been in an attic in New Jersey. Then it was bought by the black historian and bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley; after ...”

“... novels, are three representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that ‘what follows is tragedy. – Or, at least, the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it’s said.– A burlesque for our ...”

“... like: ‘Irony and absurdity seem to characterise most manifestations of the human mob.’ He may have been a collaborator – or at least an equivocator – during the Occupation. In his private affairs, in Shari Benstock’s phrase, he led ‘multiple lives, keeping multiple secrets’. In 1903, in Portugal, reporting on Edward VII’s visit there, he ...”

“... visions and conceptions still permeate many aspects of European thought and institutions. They may be discerned in the emphasis on social science as the supreme guide to public policy, on the ‘priestly’ role of technical, medical and managerial ‘experts’, on human welfare as the sole touchstone of ethical life, on ‘law’ as a set of disembodied ...”

“... aware can provide, in spite of themselves, insights into their own unreliable mental states, which may or may not be rooted in events which may or may not have happened. Aesthetes like Freddie Montgomery want to be a separate species, above human ...”

“... are busy but the sender is absent. These situations occur again and again in Kafka. And, though we may not like to admit it, elsewhere too. There are also some great not-quite parables in the selection: If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, that would have been allowed. The crows claim that a single crow could destroy ...”

“... resolution in each case, so that he can fully understand their interdependence. Dating hedgerows may have its satisfactions, especially in primeval Dorset, but what gives Hope’s English narrative its drama is her husband’s deteriorating mental state. It’s hard for most people to grasp how mathematicians think at the best of times, and even more so ...”

“... with his rival from the radio, Chester Wilmot, Moorehead was an Australian by birth – and he may well have owed some of his success (not least with his employer, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express) to a certain air of breezy informality. But there was also more than a touch of the grand seigneur about him – reflected in his automatic assumption ...”

“... escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the ...”

“... and the Everyday’. God help the students subjected to critique-al-pedagogy, whatever that may be. Say ‘convention’ in 1993, and most Americans will think of the naval rape-in at Tailhook – an orgy on a Roman scale. The excesses of MLA are not those of the flesh. Per capita there must be fewer sperm expended and less alcohol ingested than at any ...”

“... of truly distinguished analyses of the Ulster question. However many reservations a Nationalist may have about his assumptions, his text offers an admirable basis for constructive debate: this is one of those rare books about a tragic problem that one wishes were longer. Its superior quality brings us up starkly against the bleakness of the ...”

“... So on what do the claims made for Poussin’s mind ultimately rest? To answer this question it may be worth considering the subject of the painting that inspired Bernini’s remark. Its pendant, the Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion, depicts two slaves bearing the shrouded corpse of the Athenian general away from the city that had sentenced him to ...”

“... under some conditions, of copying themselves and reinserting at various places in the DNA. They may also pick up adjacent genes and carry them about. Jumping genes may have only trivial effects on evolution; but Wills argues the opposite. Some environmental changes, or shocks, ...”

“... There are already strains, with no longer any grand external danger to counteract them. Trade wars may come back; not much later, shapes of the past like the old Franco-Russian combination against Germany. A new, bigger combination of Europe and Japan against the American hegemony is not impossible to imagine; or of Europe and America against Japan and the Far ...”

“... It may not be remembered in the current mammoth Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art, but in May 1939, just after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a significant visit to England. His purpose was to deliver four lectures to the RIBA; lectures that he supplemented by showing 16 mm colour films of life at Taliesin West, the Arizona winter home of his peripatetic architectural family ...”