“... so far as Scotland’s predicament is a product of her own attitudes and responses, Gray’s work may achieve great things: it has all the requisite sympathetic humour, critical bite and moral authority to hector, cajole and enlighten. As for the imperial forces that have robbed Scotland of a market and slighted her human resources, Gray’s protest is ...”

“... DNA. The leaves peel off the Advent calendar Uncovering one chocolate every day. The decorators may have gone too far In hanging Santa Claus from his own sleigh. Behold two members of the privileged class – The young, who think that time will never pass. Too soon to tell them, even if I knew, The secret of believing life is good When all that happened ...”

“... It makes an appropriate pendant to the books on Degas. Degas’s retreat from ‘finish’ may have had something to do with failing eyesight, but looking at the drawings (he said at one point that he would have devoted his life to work in black and white if he could have done so) or the sculptures made during his last years – figures in wax not much ...”

“... in the late Forties, which suggests that Fuchs knew her to be mentally unbalanced. Fuchs may have been abnormal in being able to lock his activities into two watertight compartments and to close his mind to the implications of his spying for the colleagues who trusted him and the country that had given him shelter: but no more abnormal than Anthony ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are broad hints that Mr Sloane is Kath’s adopted child. And there are slighter hints that Eddie may be the father of Kath’s adopted child. The other candidate for fatherhood is Eddie’s adolescent friend, Tommy. Problems of censorship confuse things here. Eddie’s father hasn’t spoken to him for twenty years, after finding him ‘committing some kind ...”

“... have had to settle for a grandmother who did or didn’t try to suffocate her; a foster-father who may have raped her; 12, 13 or 15 abortions; perhaps a long-lost son. Even after her death, which now seems to have become more interesting than her life, the claims of Robert Kennedy, the Communist Party and the Mafia are undecided. On every point Steinem is ...”

“... lives so miserable that I remember kneeling by my little bed of a night and saying, “Pray God, I may dream of my mother!” ’ Separation thereafter became Thackeray’s condition of life. His power and his incurable wretchedness are crystallised in the reflection on loneliness from Pendennis which Peters takes as her epigraph: ‘Ah sir – a distinct ...”

“... plot involves power struggles of one kind or another, and its effectiveness, in part, may be gauged by the amount of intricacy and irony that goes into it. The Power trilogy is well-endowed in this respect, with every key move having a striking outcome. However, it displays some of the defects associated with the genre. The author’s approach is ...”

“... If Holmes is insignificant as art, his indestructibility is all the more significant. The wizard may be no more than a conjuror, but he has been consulted, fêted and decorated by prime ministers, kings, sultans, popes and Queen Victoria herself, not because he’s the Great Detective, but because he’s the Great Performer. That’s why he’s not such a ...”

“... employed Jobs as foreman for ‘a crew of freaks’ at his New Age apple-farming commune – which may have been the inspiration for Apple’s name. Friedland went on to make billions in mining overseas. Jobs dismissed him to Isaacson as a ‘con man’, but their careers – from self-discovery to charismatic leadership to great wealth – bear out the ...”

“... national consciousness, but it is little known elsewhere. This final outburst of bona fide fascism may seem startling without being significant, but even a semi-successful coup could have done grave damage to the new democracy. As Cercas repeats throughout the book like a mournful refrain, ‘it is a universal rule that once you bring soldiers out of their ...”

“... months are the best season for a tour in North Italy,’ Baedeker advised, ‘especially April and May or the second half of September and October.’ Richard and Ellis were travelling by the book. As for the chances of getting mugged, ‘public safety in Northern Italy is on as stable a footing as to the north of the Alps. Travellers will naturally avoid ...”

“... spawn,’ Martin Jay wrote in Downcast Eyes, his historical survey of the rhetoric of vision, may ‘be justly said to have expressed that privileging of sight so often taken to characterise the modern era in general.’ By ‘so often taken’, he is referring to the impact of Foucault’s pessimistic interpretive schemes, which ascribe to the 18th ...”

“... of prayer; more, to revere the visual effects their art has to offer and the release these may bring into contemplative pleasure. (Much as we hope to respect the wish of people not to be stared at.) And then, remembering that if we are looking on, this art will most likely be either tourist merchandise or tied to some ‘heritage’ project, we are ...”