“... self’), mocks him (‘a renegade Muslim trying to be a Buddha’), admits reluctantly that he may have gifts as a guru, and recognises, with his usual opportunism, that though he’s upset for his mother, there could be something in all this for him too. The ambitious, pretentious, unexpectedly courageous Eva does make a new life for all of them: her son ...”

“... with what Mary Wollstonecraft noticed, in her sad reckoning of 1792: that the world as it is may not be organised in the best possible way – that ‘in the exercise of their maternal feelings, Providence has provided women with a natural substitute for love.’ We ought to be asked to consider whether or not women’s love for children reveals people ...”

“... Moreover, the letters which appear in the book are almost exclusively David’s to Debbie. This may imply that Mrs Owen vetoed the publication of her compositions, thus demonstrating a seemly New England reticence which is alien to the Celtic Doctor. A more likely explanation, I fear, is that Debbie kept David’s while David chucked Debbie’s ...”

“... statism of the Labour Party – whether in its Labourist, revisionist or Fabian mode – while it may provide people with what they need does not persuade them actively to seek it or to combine in the attempt. In other words, like Toryism, it encourages them to obey. Similarly, the exclusive attitudes of Labourism, its denial of legitimacy to other ...”

“... are bringing their shock troops out into the streets of Budapest’ – a fantasy which he may have believed and which legitimated the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Under Brezhnev, the KGB was partly sidelined, partly corrupted. He and his entourage, Kuzichkin writes, hated and feared the KGB because that was where ‘their real face ...”

“... Moynihan Report was refuted, then it is not true; if only vehemently protested against, then it may be true, or not. Another way of looking at the problem is to see it as a confusion of discourses. The very language of the debate – ‘migration’, ‘ethnic’, ‘ghetto’, and, most strikingly, Lemann’s title, The Promised Land – is borrowed from ...”

“... who have had opinions on the future as well as the past of architecture. The emulating eye may be self-serving and envious, but it is also challenging and competitive. Goy and Berger, because they are more disinterested, are also less interested in the look of the buildings they deal with. Sometimes they seem downright indifferent. Both use (among ...”

“... being phased out as barriers to enterprise and foreign travel.’ Looking for the Possible Dance may sound bleak, but while Kennedy’s strength is not for humour, she carries the reader with her depiction of mood and her eye for the striking image. Commuters waiting the announcement of their train platforms stand ‘like an operatic chorus awaiting ...”

“... at the University of Minneapolis.’ But the essay modulates to a very different note: ‘it may simply be that it is in the renunciatory grain of America to resist the hierarchical and the traditional ... Looking back over the last forty years, it is now our obligation to disclaim the reactionary Eliot. What we will probably go on missing for ever is ...”

“... were now no obstacle to the laity, and claiming that use would remove any difficulty. He may have been overoptimistic – though no one who has heard a child reel off ‘diplodocus’ and ‘pterodactyl’ will be too certain – but at least here he gets a rare opportunity to meet his commentator’s tendentious reformulations head-on. Generally he ...”

“... anything but anonymous son. Then, having reduced her to a nonentity, he declares that, whatever he may have achieved in the world, compared with his mother he is ‘nothing’. Some ‘nothing’ is all one can say: there are moments when Le Premier homme seems disturbingly extreme in its mother-cult. There are pleasures in Jacques’s boyhood, but they are ...”

“... are located. To spring neuroscience’s reductionist trap, an even more astonishing hypothesis may be ...”

“... Murry wrote that the ‘denizens’ of Women in Love were lacking in individuality – though this may have meant that he couldn’t recognise himself in the book. Virginia Woolf described the Modernist experiment as an attempt to improve on Arnold Bennett and his contemporaries, who held forth in theory about the importance of character but failed miserably ...”

“... his accounts of governmental politics tend to be cursory. His attention is caught by people. He may not explore their minds and hearts but he sees the full surface. Back in England he soon assembled and carefully cultivated a kind of floating salon of compatriots, of both genders and varying sexual tastes, most of them known writers such as ...”

“... But even if fairly accurate – some parts of the manuscript have been lost, and a few others may have been tampered with by near-contemporary editors – that figure refers to what we now call ‘classical Chinese’, a written form of astonishing compression, that today needs frequent notation and explication even for Chinese readers. One recent edition ...”