“... and more lastingly than anyone else ... And he has my vote. That is what counts. Radical rejection may be forceful, but it is not interesting. Criticism proves worthwhile only when brought to bear against a group, a doctrine, a personality that one basically affirms, against mistakes that can be corrected – as later happened in the schools founded by ...”

“... life in the Soviet Union in recent years would be well advised to read Laqueur. The British reader may not know it, but Arkadi Vaksberg is one of the most popular people in the Soviet Union – a brilliant lawyer and writer. Before glasnost, be was the nearest thing to what might he called an investigative journalist, describing cases of scandalous injustice ...”

“... from one’s mental furniture. A literary tyro on this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, may well look with envy on the novelistic potential of the small-town Deep South: even that motel looks like a gift from here. The conviction that life is elsewhere is never more vivid than in childhood – I recall my wonderment as a small boy at the sound of ...”

“... on the bugler boy’s first communion he noted: ‘I am half inclined to hope that the Hero of it may be killed in Afghanistan.’ It would save him from sexual corruption. But how to be pure without being ‘time’s eunuch’? Hopkins had himself circumcised, a symbolic castration, and in his poetry – the Eurydice, the Deutschland, the charming unfinished ...”

“... that experience, and the friendships I formed with people who were there – I treasure it all. We may never see each other again; too many of the people who were there are gone. We live in dangerous times, and I’m concerned about the future. The Holocaust could happen again – I see the seeds of it.’ Ted Ferstermacher, a prosecutor, told me: ‘Nuremberg ...”

“... nothing irreversible about buildings,’ I say: ‘isn’t it possible that one day Ariel may be a Palestinian city, with Palestinians living in your houses, using your factories and enjoying your swimming-pools?’ Mayor Ron Nachman simply smiles and shakes my hand. For a man so utterly convinced of his own rectitude such a question does not merit ...”

“... parts of the country. And all the time the supposed Yugoslav capital remains calm. The military may have taken charge of the country’s politics, but there is no general state of emergency, there are no tanks guarding key buildings and crossroads in Belgrade, no martial music broadcast on the radio. That Belgrade remains peaceful while war invests ...”

“... forwards in time for the same period. The two possibilities are not irreconcilable: the period may have been very much longer than was thought (some eight centuries rather than five). But this recent evidence hardly provides a fair wind for the authors’ venture. There is worse, from their point of view, to come. The tree-ring sequence for Asia ...”

“... Sex plus money, plus a slick of current events, plus the small-town scene: the casual impulse may be to expect the least – a soap, a saga, a good thick book for the airport lobby, a comfortable fuck-flecked yardage of domestic aggravation. Nothing could be more systematically wrong. It is the genius of Updike that he can take a weak popular medium and ...”

“... problems of theory that might entail. But in poetry of the kind he aimed for (and here, I think, may be the resolution Davie does not quite reach) words draw that life-beyond-language into the life of the poem, rather than going out and surrendering to it. That is why, I believe, it is possible for capable poetry-readers to take the Cantos whole, not ...”

“... of both Ruskin and Brown, but Brown was his first and most enduring hero and mentor. This may have chilled the air between the two older men. They approved of the same people, but they could never bear each other. For Brown, the enmity was unlucky. In the 1850s Ruskin’s public applause was useful to a painter who needed to sell, and Ruskin would ...”

“... has its moments of Fauréesque harmonic sweetness. At the same time, Fauré’s boldest gestures may equally well be felt to refer backwards as well as forwards. Of the last, and ‘with the Sixth, incontestably the most moving and inspired’, of the series of 13 Nocturnes, Nectoux observes: ‘The chromatic counterpoint and the dissonances caused by ...”

“... will stifle trade unions and representative institutions. A year or two from now Boris Yeltsin may be able to stand atop the converted mausoleum and view the parade of new times: Soviet lumbermen under the command of Georgia Pacific and the Japanese: oil drillers bearing the standard of Conoco; long battalions of unemployed under the discipline of the ...”

“... came to rewarding prominence during the World Cup. What is rugby for? Is winning everything? It may not look like that when you play to your strength with half your team and then lose. Before the final, however, there were plenty of voices to be heard, on ITV and in the press, complaining about those who had complained about the lack of spectacle in the ...”

“... of the people cou’d be characteriz’d, and I protest for the motto of the meanest place, you may put “Elegant Decorum”.’ And all this gadding only five weeks after Margaret, with her new baby, had ‘added a citoyen to the French Republick’. Much as she enjoyed the months in Paris, Katherine was all agog for the next stage, to Italy. For all its ...”