“... prose insists on the briskly knowable, and shuts off any of the apertures his religious interests may have opened. ‘Tsililla had been raised on a Tolstoyan-Freudian-Socialist Kibbutz in the Galilee, equipped from infancy with such a plenitude of answers to life’s questions as to leave her awash in useless certainties.’ And that is all we hear about ...”

“... of modernity for Egan, does not to my mind fit the situation of concentration camp inmates, which may be better characterised as an intolerable stasis. Given her ambitions, it is not surprising that the quality of insight and argument varies. But her eclecticism is courageous, her specific analyses and elucidations vigorous and vivid, and her theoretical ...”

“... the contemporary interest in ‘indeterminacy, fracture and defacement in Romantic literature’ may yet transform Beddoes’s ‘failings’ into privileged literary effects. But he has been critically exhumed and then reburied several times already, and there is no guarantee that this most recent attempt won’t join that doomed tradition. Beddoes’s ...”

“... disabling paranoid schizophrenia. With a nice sense of the dramatic, Nasar starts her story on a May afternoon in 1959, with Nash, 30 years old, and with ‘a vast, distorted universe whispering in his head’, flopped in an armchair in the secure lounge of Maclean Hospital, an asylum near Boston where he had been committed for observation by MIT ...”

“... up. ‘Can I ask you one question?’   ‘Of course, ask away!’   ‘I fear that I may have difficulty getting hired. If they will not take me because of my past, can I turn to you?’   ‘Yes, yes, of course!’ the official exclaimed warmly. The official feels no need for either formal coldness or for guilt; he can be merry about his ...”

“... from the relief activities, and even in the short run, Shawcross suggests, the main effect may have been to soothe our consciences. A large amount of international aid was used to feed combatants. The United Nations World Food Programme had a cosy relationship with the Royal Thai Army and delivered large quantities of food that it knew were being used ...”

“... abdication’. His gratification that this framework accommodates the findings of his contributors may be somewhat overdone. His second synthesis is a broader one which includes the lesser. It has to do with the role of the landed men in English life in a much more general sense, and represents a current reinter-pretational convergence. It is that the landed ...”

“... British attitudes to the governing of Africa and which Lamb elsewhere rightly decries. Numeiri may indeed be the genuine article, but the notion is so hard to define that it would take only a slight realignment of the logic to adduce a General Stroessner or a Castro as an example of the same breed. One is left with the feeling that the old saw about ...”

“... in Islam. Fundamentalist Islam, especially in its Quranic punishments and Us treatment of women, may appear ‘backward’ to many Westerners, but it is worth taking seriously Ernest Gellner’s suggestion that, of all the great religious traditions, Islam is in many respects the one most open to modernity. Certainly, as Maxime Rodinson has ...”

“... seems to have been quite advanced – particularly for a predominantly Muslim society.Some may dismiss Hoxha as paranoid, but it is not hard to feel that much of his overriding concern with security has a sound basis. During the Second World War Britain, Albania’s ostensible ally, would not even proclaim support for the country’s ...”

“... importance in Irish writing. The reasons are obvious, but the debt is so large that it may go unpaid. Since the early days of the 19th century, at least from Sir Samuel Ferguson up to the present, there has been a powerful interaction between scholarship and poetry which has enriched all Irish writing in English. Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, James ...”

“... is hard to say. But at least it communicates a sense of exciting heterogeneity. Older readers may turn to the end item, by Angus Wilson, anticipating a return to the form in which he first excelled. But ‘Sri Lankan Journal’ is thin stuff. Never having kept a journal before, he tells us, Wilson decided to do so during the travelling that coincided with ...”

“... nella citta Ha ha ha, ha ha ha – for he was certainly an opera buff, even if his expertise may in part have rested on a self-confessed preference for ‘fleshy women’ over skinny ballet dancers. When the 24-year-old Callas appeared on the Verona scene in 1947, his friends described her as ‘a sack of potatoes’. Meneghini was then a dashing ...”

“... then slide into qualifications and inquiries. The difference between statement and reservation may be no more than a syllable, so that error or change is presented as being built into what she sees, as it is in the first poem here, ‘The Map’: Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long ...”

“... Franco’s Spain remain neutral? How should we have treated France after the Armistice? And what may happen to a marriage when two people so much in love are forced to live apart?’ As here presented, the first two questions are hardly less personal than the third. We are meant to conclude for the wisdom of the Eccles line, but few people at this time of ...”