“... but with a grasp of the obsession, with an evocation of how odd excitement is, how little it may be related to anything obviously exciting. Conversation with Mr Nicholas was enough to complicate excitement. ‘At the first hint of co-operation with his excitement his father lost interest.’ The excitement is authentic, and so is its draining. ‘He felt ...”

“... of the In-itself and the For-itself, which Sartre sees as part of the universal human condition, may ultimately be only a transfigured form of the intellectual dream which Flaubert expressed more naively: ‘to live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god’ (i.e. like an intellectual). Thus, even in his life, divided between his desk and the literary ...”

“... Gelli has escaped from the Swiss prison from which he was about to be extradicted to Italy, and may now be in Latin America; Calvi is dead; Archbiship Marcinkus, banker of the Vatican who could say so much if he wished to, is safely ensconced behind its walls. In Italy, where there is no strong central government, but strong alternative seats of power in ...”

“... it; spontaneity and habit. As for thinking, our poets can do that for us by showing how feelings may unglibly be brought to equilibrium. The morality of the right ordering of sensation is what Thwaite’s poems strain toward: as in ‘Sick Child’, he tries to cope with helplessness and foreignness of the appalling kind. No theory of inspiration incites ...”

“... Wagner, ostensibly to manage the complexity of directing their own music, but with a keen eye, we may be sure, on its potential for self-aggrandisement. Otto Klemperer seems to have taken his size for granted. Tyranny came as naturally to him as to a child, and he exercised it with a child-like innocence. ‘Among other incivilities, he had, it was ...”

“... a system that they could not beat Which reasserts itself through their distress. White flakes may decorate the searchlight beams – The barbed wire is exactly what it seems. Those men and women braver than the brave Penned in the open air are telling you It’s better to risk death than be a slave – Something you thought that you already knew. And ...”

“... this so much the worse for the modern world, alarm bells should be ringing. ‘I like it here’ may be a valuable corrective to national self-denigration, but it is not a sufficient guide to the problems of national existence in the present or the future. Allison’s denunciation of media crisis-mongering is disturbingly reminiscent of Vice-President ...”

“... to one’s own funeral: no beneficiary of the prize had ever gone on to write anything good. It may be coincidence (as opposed to an onset of Delphic delusion), but Bellow’s first post Nobel novel transmits all the strain and clangour of a juggernaut changing gear. The vision has widened but also become narrower; most noticeably, the fluid musicality of ...”

“... and Winston Churchill (‘Why I’m voting for Maggie’). The actual authorship of these articles may be controversial but no complaint has been received from Messrs Stalin and Churchill, so the Sun is legally in the clear. In any case, the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who unswervingly supports Mrs Thatcher and is exceedingly rich. The Soaraway Sun ...”

“... in Britain who belong to racial minorities do not share a single set of left-wing views: they may all be opposed to racism, but they have different ideas about how to overcome it. Joe Williams, a black councillor in Reading who has been a forthright campaigner for racial equality for many years, recently opposed a council proposal to spend money on ...”

“... like a child crying because its parents have left it in the dark all alone.’ That last sentence may show more psychological penetration than Russell knew: the death of both his parents when he was four was undoubtedly a large factor in determining his lifelong feeling of loneliness and isolation. Russell speaks often of the good effects Ottoline had on ...”

“... the ultimate ‘alterity’ of death itself. Indeed, to focus on gender difference, she suggests, may serve to occlude a considerably more fundamental difference, as Freud’s privileging of castration anxiety and woman’s ‘lack’ obscures the mortal anxiety shared by male and female alike – the ‘lack’ inherent in being human. Though Over Her Dead ...”

“... problem seriously. How he did so is well documented, first in an interview with him recorded on 27 May and published in the exhibition catalogue, secondly in a lecture given at the Tate on 1 October and published in the current issue of the Art Newspaper. I quote from the interview: The architecture as a whole is overblown, authoritarian and a bit ...”

“... to stone it? They missed; the mountain did not yield up its mouse. Today’s Himalayan trekkers may feel that Henriette exaggerates the rigours of the high places, but in the conditions of the day it was a formidable feat. George Sand and her shaggy rabble would never have got to first base. No wonder that (according to the Annual Register, 1838) Chamonix ...”

“... no less to interviewers and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like Jean Fontenoy, editor of Le Journal de ...”