“... mass destruction are designed and manufactured by human beings. Politicians and military leaders may initiate the preparations for nuclear warfare but the actual manufacture is in the hands of scientists whose devotion should be to the future of mankind. For that matter, every citizen of a free country has a responsibility to help in ridding the world of ...”

“... his eyes mad. ‘Why not? It will be very good for the economy. The manufacture of safety-belts may even offer temporary employment to some of the Redundants, before computerisation takes place’. He was very upset. I smiled and hummed. Grabbing my arm, he pointed to a couple of children in the plastic-sand pit. Not many children come into Hyde Park, since ...”

“... Archeologia (1971). However erratic, confusing and deceptive the mass of archaeological evidence may be, it is surely out of place to write as if it did not exist. A glance at F. Coarelli on public building in Rome between the Second Punic War and Sulla will confirm that behind the major issues of the Gracchan period lies the rapid development of urban life ...”

“... a simple visceral response to a preserved penis in a jar, then we should have talked because there may have been room for manoeuvre. Who knows, if the contents of the preserving-jar had been shrouded in murky liquid, its contents only to be glimpsed and guessed at, if it had been seen, once Maisie had broken the jar open, as undifferentiated grey tissue on ...”

“... turned itself into a separate space-time continuum in which there is nothing but the poetry. This may seem so grotesque a point to make about the churchy, snobby, peopled, artlessly confiding and revealing world of Betjeman that it requires some clarification. Take the early poem ‘Death in Leamington’ – Betjeman’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as it ...”

“... Davies, through the Enlightenment administrators, to liberal Tories, or Gladstone and Asquith. It may be unfair to suggest that Johnson believes that the Irish always needed to be taught (though this is how the period of ‘Celtic disorder’ is portrayed), but he shows a certain sympathy for those who imposed real dominion ...”

“... flat and left a neat docket of pawn tickets on the mantelpiece. Readers of Blessings in Disguise may sometimes feel that the book is Hamlet without the Prince, but the publishers are at pains to point out that this is not ‘the exercise in egomania purveyed by so many actors and actresses’. It is on the whole a fascinating account of some of Guinness’s ...”

“... Pritchard elucidates in this characteristically direct, helpful, teacherly summary: ‘The phrase may accommodate either an underlining of “sound” or of “sense”, thereby setting up a playful shuttling between the poem as communicating something, some grain of wisdom or truth about the world (the sound of sense), and the poem as wholly embodying that ...”

“... an explicable, properly-run universe. Theology is everywhere, the sceptical Valéry said, and this may be a tiny proof. The perception is disturbing to rational, fact-hungry humans, and it haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test ...”

“... place-names, stories, flora and fauna. Mr Campbell keeps carefully to his sources, though he may take them too seriously. It is engaging that he believes a mid-17th-century chief of Clanranald could and would himself write a long letter to the Pope in Latin. His weakness is a failure of historical detachment: the grievances about the pressure of ...”

“... writer’s cool obsession with death, and his evident conviction that in articulo mortis there may be that moment of supreme clarity which the novelist spends his creative life hunting. Time and again, Fuentes’s novel alludes to ‘the man hanged from Owl Creek Bridge, who at the instant of his death could see the veining of each leaf; more: the very ...”

“... ear it seems to combine the words ‘agony’ and ‘anon’, with a hint of ‘agnostic’. It may also remind us of the Greek words for ‘lamb’, and for ‘holy’ or ‘wise’. The echoes are fortuitous, but they are not unapt. For, as David Aberbach shows, Agnon was preoccupied throughout his writing career with the private sufferings of passive ...”

“... I go back to my room. ‘What a bastard I am,’ I keep whispering, ‘what a bastard I am.’ He may have been a bastard, but he could write. And, what’s more, he was correct in his assessment of his editor’s prose style. There might have been some point to all this if focusing on ‘Didi’s’ many delinquencies had resulted in a better book. But ...”

“... secondly to knowledge, thirdly to freedom from inferiorities and fourthly to anything that may be worthwhile.’ This, from a curly-headed minor who, to compound his cheek, ordered her to read the whole of Proust in French. Yet he approved of her sufficiently to propose marriage. Elizabeth Harman, it is clear, had the measure of him, as she had of ...”

“... every citizen was a precious national asset. The same was true of Britain during the Great War, as may be discovered from Jay Winter’s superb scholarly analysis. The subject-matter is more specialised than his title suggests. This is a socio-economic historian’s investigation of the impact of war on population trends and civilian health, with an ...”