“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... affection for that uncomplicated scoundrel is foolish. The Hogg view of his Tory colleagues may not be backed by much detail, but we get the message. Maudling was a lightweight, Macleod a first-rater, Edward Boyle is rightly adored, Margaret Thatcher did right by Quintin and so, despite differences, should be seen as a good thing. There are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... with Burke; at the very least, as David Bromwich proposes in quite another context, they may have to embrace a Burkean language but wrest it to non-Burkean ends. This means that the relationship with ‘New Historicism’ and its marxisant traditions will inevitably be uneasy. When Harrison notices a human dwelling-place in Constable’s Study of the ...”

“... As in Catholic and Protestant homes, the aim was to facilitate the passage of the dead (‘May the angels take thee into paradise’) and to comfort the grief-stricken through familiar rituals that imposed order on the chaos of loss. Psychologists, psycho-historians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists have all weighed in on the meaning of these ...”

“... claim of being a gentleman. In upholding McCarthyism while he was in Washington, for example, he may well have had to meet objections from his superiors at the Times, but he can hardly be said to have occupied a position of signal isolation or courage. Yet he writes as if his prejudice took nerve. Similarly, he describes making a scene at the house of Brian ...”

“... and rebukes his earlier stuff as ‘too literary, too full of its own cleverness’. Auster may be shaking his head at his own earlier work here, as where he notes that Sachs’s novel sometimes ‘feels too constructed, too mechanical in its orchestration of events, and only rarely do any of the characters come fully to life.’ If so, he’s unduly ...”

“... terror. She is afraid of drugs and afraid that all the drinks she’s offered, even a cup of tea, may be spiked. ‘She thought, I’ll know in 20 minutes ... if by twenty to eleven her mind hadn’t caved in and splintered like a sheet of glass, she’d know she was going to be all right.’ She is worried that her mother will turn up late, as indeed she ...”

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

“... one of the nurses, says I might be able to go carrying the drain heavily disguised by a shawl. I may be on television as it is the launch of a famous person’s book. When they’ve gone I read the Observer. There’s a two-page spread on breast cancer. ‘If three or more lymph glands are affected, 30 per cent of women survive for ten years.’ I don’t ...”

“... actually made two documentaries with the help of the KGB. The first, Comrade Philby, went out in May 1990. The second, Strange Neighbours, about the American spy couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, who acted as a communications link between London and Moscow for Gordon Lonsdale and the Portland spy-ring, went out in November 1991. Both were co-productions, in ...”

“... cent our fathers – no getting away from that. Thank you very much, Mendel, Crick and Watson. We may deny genetic destiny, and speak contemptuously of reductionism, but I suspect that the nature half of the nature/nurture debate troubles us deeply and perpetually, like a grumbling appendix. You can only hold onto the fantasy of turning out to be a foundling ...”