“... is my friend Kim. We knew each other in London.’ When Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow in May 1951 Philby came under suspicion by association. The reasoning was as follows: ‘Burgess is a Communist spy. He shared a house in Washington with Philby, the crack counter-intelligence officer. If Philby didn’t know, then he is a lousy counter-intelligence ...”

“... murky water. Only after the eye has traversed this organic equivalent of a ditchful of barbed wire may it enter the paradise beyond. The other way in which Constable’s land is more factual than Claude’s is that the human action which goes on there in the open has to do with horny-handed toil rather than the pursuit of love or war. So the reigning calm and ...”

“... arrived about the sinking. ‘I’ve had to change it all because there’s a report that there may be 1200 Argies dead,’ he told Murdoch. ‘I wouldn’t have pulled it if I were you,’ replied the proprietor of the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Seemed like a bloody good headline to me.’) The vaudeville does have a serious side, however – or perhaps ...”

“... of these conversations found its way into the Sunday Express at the time they happened. They may have provided some leads, and perhaps an entrée to the leader page. But only on a highly selective basis was Junor in the business of telling his readers straight out what really happened, when, as he chronicles it in this book, he was quite often in a ...”

“... Cold War and only elevated from this state by the crisis in the Gulf where their infernal devices may receive their first exposure to reality outside the engineering shed and the faked test. Los Angeles needs a historian, a political scientist, a sociologist, a pamphleteer, with the synoptic power to teach us how to see and seize it whole at the moment of its ...”

“... of our culture are contributing to the elevation of Mozart as a prime cultural icon. But it may in the end be more responsible to return to Braunbehrens’s biography, certainly the most ambitious of the books under review. For Braunbehrens differs from his competitors in one essential respect. Landon, in common with the majority of his musicological ...”

“... public purposes and the categorical illegitimacy of royal rule. However self-deceived he may have been, Saint-Just plainly knew that it was a hard struggle to sustain his political ascendancy. On ne peut point régner ...”

“... professional psychologists or to rely on one’s own unchallenged assumptions. These assumptions may in fact prove generally adequate, yet in the case of the French Revolution the extraordinary passions released by the event do not seem wholly intelligible without more rigorous psychological analysis. What is one to make of the 22-year-old Saint-Just holding ...”

“... the ages have puffed up their little initiatives (what does Paragraph 59 mean, other than ‘we may be a bit more flexible about who we take, but don’t bet on it’?). Elsewhere, the language has a more sinister tinge. In the ‘Statement of Purpose’ it is declared that ‘our function is to serve scholarship, research and enterprise.’ What would ...”

“... in a strip cartoon? Why, in short, doesn’t Rosenthal stop and think? A failure to stop and think may be one explanation, however partial, of a staggering statement made by Rosenthal in the course of a recent catalogue essay for an exhibition of Gilbert and George in Peking and Shanghai. It is a passage which could have been treated as the expression of a ...”

“... which she was born. ‘What exactly is a harem?’ she recalls herself worrying as a child. Harems may depend on a critical distinction between inside and out, but it proves far from easy, as Mernissi discovers, to know just when one has crossed the line. In The Harem Within Mernissi describes how she and her young cousins used to retreat to the ...”

“... the window to be covered by a sheet, which was eventually replaced by net curtains. Other inmates may also have set to work manufacturing the escape gear in the TV room, where the windows were shaded in greater style by Venetian blinds. The windows to the gymnasium were obscured by a large refrigerator. Not even the perspicacious Sir John seems to know the ...”

“... and interesting people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by ...”

“... to redress the balance of the surface world of Restoration France, the surface world not as it may actually have been but the shrunken, partial and too lenient view he supposed his contemporaries to take of it. Where their view was accepting for being incomplete, his would be damning for being total. Thanks to his imaginary staircase into the lower ...”

“... of each enterprise with which he was associated; but he rarely fulfilled the promise. One may be censorious and argue that his career testifies to the vanity of political ambition, but this is a bank manager’s view, and something must be said on the other side. Chamberlain put on a great show which, wherever he took it, made a very large number of ...”