“... themselves know better. It’s not because substance X produces an effect on pathology Y that one may conclude that the substance acts specifically on the cause of Y. No one would think to say, for example, that aspirin is an ‘anti-flu’ medication on the pretext that it relieves flu symptoms, or that whisky is an ‘antidepressant’ because it lifts your ...”

“... Court; and they would be foolish anyway not to do so, since non-compliant court decisions may put the UK in breach of its international obligation to observe the Convention. Even so, on such issues as enforced self-incrimination the UK courts have begun to plough a deviant and – as I have argued in the LRB (7 March) – welcome furrow. But it became ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... later became vice-president of Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, died at the age of 72 on 23 May in his Ramallah home, after a long illness. I learned of his death as I was walking out of Tel Aviv airport on my way to see him. He was my oldest and dearest friend, remarkable as an introspective thinker and a charismatic political teacher and leader, whose ...”

“... the aim of the house was to ‘open a window to Europe and the world’. So a kind of xenophobia may explain the harsh treatment meted out to Calder, Maschler and (to a lesser extent) Blond’s memoirs. A more likely irritant is the pushiness of young men in a hurry. Maschler was lucky to arrive on the scene on the eve of the 1960s, a decade friendly to ...”

“... a little way to the north must leave the city along the road to the east (which is now open, but may be closed again at a moment’s notice), and, running the gauntlet of checkpoints and roadblocks, make his roundabout way to the east and then the north before reaching his land.Or, rather, before reaching the gate closest to his land. During the months after ...”

“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... of ‘quasi self-defence’ (with the doctors acting on Gracie’s behalf). Rosie, he wrote, ‘may have a right to life, but she has little right to be alive. She is alive because and only because, to put it bluntly, but nonetheless accurately, she sucks the lifeblood of [Gracie] and she sucks the lifeblood out of [Gracie] . . . If [Gracie] could speak she ...”

“... them: Frank would have had a hard time keeping the heir to Marple Hall in line. Oedipal gratitude may account for Isherwood’s later attachment to Berlin and young Germans of military age. With his father dead, his mother, Kathleen, became the focus of his youthful repudiations. His break for freedom was devastating for the family members he left ...”

“... stayed there, but he was determined to distinguish himself. Cranborne was quite the opposite. By May 1915 he had developed ringing noises in one ear which saw him invalided home. While Crookshank and Macmillan, who had both been seriously injured, were being passed ready to return to the front line, Cranborne was passed fit only for ‘light duties’, which ...”

“... said, ‘but there’s something missing. You could call it moral responsibility.’ The bombers may have been bound together by a conviction they were working ‘in the name of Allah’, but they did not heed the second half of the prayer which Muslims are supposed to say as they begin any significant action: ‘In the name of Allah, the most ...”

“... his fondness for hyperbole, and his ever-growing obsession with glamour. Max and India may have started out as cool and conceptual, but they end as a fantasy of sophistication and omni-competence that would make Ian Fleming blush. Their gilded world is about to be rudely invaded, however: the ambassador is slaughtered on his daughter’s doorstep ...”

“... it gave a further stimulus to Platonic studies. Philosophical Platonism was distinct from what may be called the natural Platonism of certain imaginative writers, which was not uncommon during the Romantic period. Platonism of a kind pervades Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ Ode, and it is present too in much of Shelley’s work. Ruskin read Plato ...”

“... he would have had matter for it. However, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and it may well be that a single volume, closely packed as this one had to be, will serve his own and Cummings’s memory better. The general reader will hardly want two volumes on the whole population of 20th-century poets – nor, when one thinks of Johnson’s ...”

“... technology, especially in the conmmon-carrier and interactive versions of teletext. It may well not be taken, given the pressure to adapt the technology to current forms of news and marketing. But there would be immediate gain if broadcast news could be, in effect, footnoted, given the developing teletext services which can both handel and recall ...”