“... Lorna Wing explains why these sorts of phobia might arise: People with autistic disorders ... may be unaware of the boundaries between objects that to others seem so obvious ... They lack an internal structure for their lives. They need to have an external framework constructed for them by those who care for them and teach them. The most successful find ...”

“... against the Spaniards in the West Indies, an expedition on which Drake died. Although Hawkins may not have blamed him, it has been suggested that Drake blamed himself, converting much of this powerful emotion into a still more bitter hatred for the Spaniards. At all events he conceived a huge, undying indignation against them which was probably his most ...”

“... Castro’s a dictator, he adds, and it’s healthy to oppose one’s government, whatever it may be. Jews and Mormons, he goes on to say, have taken over America and a lot of people will have to be exterminated for the planet to survive. He’s planning to make a speech tonight praising Hitler for stopping the growth of Communism. He recites a short poem ...”

“... is an ultra bourgeois family, how many invalids in it, combien de malades dedans?’ We may not all come from bourgeois families, but we can all ask similar questions. How many secrets, how many corpses, old loves, old horrors? The narrator’s father takes his two sons for a walk and tells them what he thinks of as a ghastly piece of the family’s ...”

“... or destroying capitalism, has for a century enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with it. Socialists may have begun by preaching the obsolescence of both capitalism and the nation, but in the course of time they discovered that ‘the fortunes of socialism were inexorably bound up with those of the [capitalist] nation within which it operated.’ This was ...”

“... of opening up, not a journey into the interior. Though people who speak at recovery meetings may tell compelling, cathartic narratives, these do not instantly qualify as literature. One of the most apposite of the 12-step slogans that walk the boundary between the trite and the profound could serve as this book’s epigraph: ‘You’re only as sick as ...”

“... unit of meaning but as part of a dynamic, a structure of writing whose actual purpose and effect may be at odds with what it appears to express. What matters in this structure is the dynamic of address, the space of writing, the distance between the correspondents, not the message or the individual. Kaufmann studies Kafka’s letters to Felice ...”

“... offer. At first he could judge his new world only by standards of provincial gentility. ‘You may wonder if I am meeting the right kind of friends over here,’ he wrote, a few months after his arrival in Paris. ‘Well, I am tremendously lucky as by some means or other I have met only the really nice people who figure very high in society over ...”

“... match Patton in the publicity stakes, and he was a very much duller man. For the British, Patton may have been a minor if spectacular figure in World War Two, significant only for his rivalry with Montgomery; but for many in the United States he remains the Great American Hero, who like all such heroes (including Rommel) was underrated and betrayed by an ...”

“... one’s visible in the rain-soaked yard, though the hubcaps sparkle and clank in the breeze. She may be seeing something as a metaphor for something else.    Unexpectedly, though, she sits forward and lays a consolidating mitt on Joe’s bare, hairy shoulder, which causes him to jump like he’d been stabbed. Though he quickly detects this as a gesture ...”

“... and dilemmas. Further, the painting is closely related to Corneille’s tragedy Horace and may be said to be influenced, or indeed inspired, by the contemporary debate, which itself was partly political, over the relative merits of Corneille and Racine. ‘Racine makes lovers out of his syllables so that nothing can separate them,’ wrote a ...”

“... understand that you simply can’t leave the Politburo and Council of Commissars to Kuibyshev (he may start drinking) or to Kaganovich for long?’ Molotov had to return from vacation early, and Stalin with rare politeness remarked that this made him ‘a little uncomfortable’. Stalin could rely on Molotov’s complete loyalty. In the long series of ...”

“... write. He pretended to have a low regard for his thrillers, as simply his source of cash, and they may have seemed to him not merely unserious but also unmanly: one can’t imagine Sandy Arbuthnot with a novel in his top drawer. He liked his historical novels better, but if he was to be remembered as a writer, he wanted it to be for his biographies. And all ...”

“... What Chirac wants and how he will achieve it no one knows, perhaps not even Chirac. Since May 1968, he has held politicians in low esteem, and he does not much like top professional civil servants either, many of them – like himself and his prime minister Alain Juppé – graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. And his programme is no ...”

“... and cumulatively surreal details about the life of a character who, after a couple of pages, may be immediately sucked back into obscurity. ‘What’s going on out there,’ somebody in A Hall of Mirrors says, ‘is there are like a few billion people walking around and every one of them has a head with a lot of stuff going on in it.’ ‘I want to ...”