“... for it is essentially one of them. Fish’s argument that theory has no practical consequences may be thought to bring to the fore all the least attractive features of his style of argument. This is on its face a startling thesis: to say that all one has to do is to ignore theory and do whatever comes naturally seems at the outset to be unable to deal with ...”

“... resources policy, or lack of it, and the frequent unwisdom of its conservationists. (Greeney she may not be, but greenie she is, whatever her quarrels with the rest of them.) Earlier on, she sounded often like one more case of that expatriate’s syndrome which so often sends resident Australian intellectuals into fits of teeth-grinding irritation – that ...”

“... and the merits of patriarchy as a ruling principle, to take a central example, the reader may well come away feeling decidedly sympathetic to Paine’s no-nonsense prose, matched to Paine’s no-nonsense demand that he should be shown the much-vaunted British constitution before being asked to refer it to the French, and preferring Mary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Home Affairs Minister, declared, after the shooting of Cusack and Beattie: ‘I feel that it may be necessary to shoot even more in the forthcoming months’? Had not the newly-formed extremist Democratic Unionist Party announced on the day before the march that they were prepared to give the Government ‘a final opportunity’ to prove their promises ...”

“... develop a more informed sense of what is at stake. For example, charges of Japanese protectionism may be justified, but the complex network of small shops which so frustrates Western exporters ‘has served social purposes such as stability, security and community preservation’. Trade negotiations, Miyoshi demonstrates, will only succeed if they are ...”

“... at one point, and only debts made him sell them. That he so admired Smith’s angst-free canvases may say something about the feeling Epstein wished his own paintings to project. Smith achieved the kind of pleasure in colour and pigment which Epstein seems to be after. But Smith was a much better painter, and did not share Epstein’s attachment to the themes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... while allowing and even encouraging them to make false moves that played into his hands. By May 1937, he had ‘control over every aspect of political life. Only the areas of jurisdiction of the Church eluded him,’ though he had the Church’s enthusiastic support for his so-called crusade. ‘Otherwise, his powers were comparable to those of Hitler ...”