“... anecdotal level means that, while her examples will give useful ammunition to the converted, they may well fail to persuade the sceptics. Is legal gender neutrality a plausible aim in a world in which hierarchy according to sex is a general feature of social practice? If not, the implication seems to be that at least in some areas reform should be ...”

“... confusion. Yet it was not unrelieved. Two soldiers – judging by their wild demeanour, they too may have been drunk – took the lead in the chaos, making it immeasurably worse by their furious vendettas against particularly stubborn women who would not sit down (few would) or who insisted on finding their luggage or their children separated from them in ...”

“... create a perfect nakedness for the imperfect, disharmonious body of the aspiring artist. A writer may proudly wear it in Elysium, where it can rightly show his true genius to be free of ornamental lumber and awkward posing. But Kafka, with all his swiftly crystallised artistic ambition, was nevertheless deeply ambivalent about the aspect of life embodied in ...”

“... members – the heads of the only three resident Serbian families and one Croat. The Partisans may have carried the idea of local self-management down from the mountains with the ideological fervour of Marxists, but here power was still yoked to ethnicity. Ironically, a Jew saved Nikola Blazevic’s life. As railway superintendent, Blazevic had used his ...”

“... to be essential reading. But those long appreciative of Brenan’s thought and his sober style may well prefer to stay with the ‘fantasies and evasions’, the distortions of truth, convinced that they served Gerald to distil more important ...”

“... public interest, on the other. We have no means of knowing how his brush with the tabloid press may have affected his attitude, either consciously or subconsciously, now that some kind of decision on the need for a privacy law seems imminent. No doubt that was part of the reasoning behind Mr Mellor’s honourable offer to resign his post. But the Prime ...”

“... a Columbus who was both prophet and profiteer. The lesson is salutary: Columbus’s religion may have started as an affectation before it became an intense conviction. He was, after all, a professional salesman and natural rhetorician, who had an infallible trick of telling potential backers what they wanted to hear. He had thoroughly rumbled the ...”

“... society. The readings in factories, which the Government probably grew progressively less keen on, may now sound chi-chi, but she was not ‘alienated’ and ‘marginalised’, as she felt Western writers were. Goethe’s ‘creativity without society’ she glosses impulsively: ‘what a horrible thought!’ You could say that her need for the GDR to exist ...”

“... tunnelling machines now lie buried deep beneath the sea, heroic martyrs to their own monument. May they rest in peace – belated builders of a dream, immured in deep blue ...”

“... Nemerov – whose voice is heard throughout – for this kind of mild civic editorial. Updike may not, in truth, know how to write poetry; but his deep talent is such that even the slightest poem rarely flows away without leaving some valuable deposit. As in the novels, Updike chooses a detail, expands and warms it. A mosquito is seen thus: ‘on the fine ...”

“... caution that ‘this relatively low rate’ – it seems to me a staggeringly low rate – ‘may not have implied chastity or strict moral codes among the young’; but it is hard to see quite what else it could imply, given the absence of most known modes of contraception. What these statistics strongly and surprisingly suggest is that the sexual ...”

“... its collar. She recognised her collar, but never made it the object of sweet dreams. Dog-like she may have been in her devotion to her husband, Sergei Efron, but the only thing that ever truly concerned her was, as she herself wrote, to make human speech convey the inarticulate noises of instinctive emotion. The phatic protolanguage of the groan and the ...”

“... those only seconds behind them did.’ He searched archives for material that the Forest Service may have deliberately lost during the controversy that followed the disaster. He consulted experts on the nature of fire, including mathematicians who had made ‘models’ of wildfires. He wanted to know as much as he could know, and he wanted to be able to turn ...”

“... observatory) would be ‘sufficiently capacious to receive five millions of the dead, where they may repose in perfect security’. The scheme foundered, but if anyone feels like reviving it, I’d be happy to make a contribution in return for a guaranteed place somewhere near the pinnacle. Failing that, I thought I would after all settle for the shared ...”

“... the forces of social oppression, and even Vera herself, billowy, accepting earth mother though she may be, is exasperatingly ungraspable, a figure caught only momentarily, as if in the headlights of a passing car. The kind of ellipsis Murphy allows for here fares better on the stage, where intangibles – the movements of bodies; the nuances of speech – fill ...”