“... immigrant shanties, rather than the extremes of rural despair I had imagined. He said that the PRI may have given the peasants land but they have provided no infrastructure. It’s a pioneering society left to its own devices, a cacophony of religions, languages and ideologies from all over Chiapas and, indeed, the Republic. Divided, pugnacious and ...”

“... as they are, depend on the workings of the thriller or mystery story, something that Enzensberger may have spotted when he spoke of an ‘English’ view of the Continent. Many Englishmen, in that last period of authority and empire, were conditioned to see life as an adventure story, with themselves in a casually dominant role. For all Hughes’s throwaway ...”

“... information about Feynman, much of it presented in the master’s own voice. For physicists, this may be the preferred biography. In the end, Feynman’s life story, wonderfully crazy, is immune to any number of blunders on the part of a potential biographer. Feynman seemed to be in direct, intuitive contact with the fundamental realities of the universe. A ...”

“... including the hoarding and preserving of unusual, irreplaceable or tasteful possessions. It may also be that, far from denying inherited traits, Nigel Nicolson and other labourers in the heritage industry are acting in tradition, both in flaunting their ancestors’ rare acquisitions for public stupefaction and edification, and in relying on the middle ...”

“... pigs under control or understand the principles of house maintenance. (Similar conclusions, we may remember, were proclaimed during the last century in the pages of Punch.) Murder and mutilation are not alien to them (did she ever imagine they were?). Their behaviour at the dinner table is unengaging. This literary girl, very strangely, blames James Joyce ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... finding, in 1953, that the transfer of a Chinese philosophic-poetic concept into English ‘may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos’ would now strike one as hyperbolic but plausible. St Jerome is again claiming his place as patron of letters. The sources of this change are various; and engage the ...”

“... down to the haughty and imperious character of the supposed descendant of the tyrants of Verona may well be ascribed to the habit of adopting an arrogant and contentious tone which was common among the Humanists of the time. Yet Scaliger was a striking and dominating personality, as much evidence attests. When Grafton writes of Politian’s ‘tail-wagging ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of experimental method was seriously flawed and, to the extent that Fleming was influenced by it, may have contributed to Fleming’s erroneous inference about the limitations of penicillin. Florey, on the other hand, was trained by the distinguished physiologist Charles Sherrington. That difference alone goes a long way to explaining why the therapeutic ...”

“... tried to do of late, the more ephemeral the individual work becomes. Like any work of science, it may contribute to a development: but it is soon superseded, and once it is superseded its interest is gone. Empson’s writings are not in this class. They have a life of their own, more important than their influence, and they move away from the literature of ...”

“... and that the admirer of T.S. Eliot won’t readily respond to Lewis’s The Wild Body – which may well be true, and if true it is interesting, but what has it to do with ‘the making of the reader’? And indeed it’s with an audible sigh that Trotter returns to this matter, in order to round off his book with some propriety. He honestly admits that the ...”

“... Polyana. ‘My victory was so easy I did not even rejoice. Today I am a commissar, tomorrow I may be in prison.’ She was. During the next period she was arrested three times and spent several months in gaol. As soon as she was released, she went to Kalinin, ‘the Elder of All Russia’ in the Kremlin. She proposed setting up a school at Yasnaya ...”

“... can spend less than they receive, or use past savings or borrowings to spend more. Thus there may be deficiencies in demand leading to unemployment, or excesses leading to rising prices and inflation. Demand management, based mainly on the influence of J.M. Keynes, was intended to offset these swings, the government varying the balance between its own ...”

“... all do more or less – we hardly feel disposed to say that we should never have suspected it. We may even wonder whether his colleagues might not agree that his ‘ill-humour is all-besetting’, though it is part of the reticence of the journal that we hear little of his displays of it. He is ‘a dissident’, he says, because he does not ‘love all ...”