“... time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour’s time, for it was all a gamble’, their shackles may weaken and fall. The chimpanzees are incomparably more intelligent and responsible than most human beings, merely lack the organs to produce the sounds we have agreed to call language. Tigers wonder, every time they go into their act, why they are so pleased ...”

“... by those guardian laws, which bind the various orders of society in one common interest ... may the people, amongst whom I live, be withheld by stronger repellants than their own virtue, from invading my property and shedding my blood!!’ Knight was by temperament a stirrer, who enjoyed surprising and annoying the Establishment. But he was no blinkered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are all about the (usually young) hero’s access to, or extraction of, some kind of capital. This may be achieved by violence, witchcraft, crime, trickery, patronage, by the ritual intimidation of charivaris, local protectionism designed to keep strange competitors out, or by getting the girl pregnant, as JLP does Babeau and Sestier does Garouille (a ...”

“... if it is supposed to be a history of Europe, then the digressions outside it, fascinating as they may be, are unnecessarily long. Yet when a book is at once as novel, as exciting and as illuminating as The Structures of Everyday Life, it would be a mistake for anyone except a librarian to worry about the category into which it should be placed. In the 15 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lies grant him temporary satisfactions, but at the cost of a deep loneliness and a fear that he may in fact be an evil, unkind man. The roots of Herbert Badgery’s personality are damaged, and it is this which ultimately limits the scope of Illywhacker. Herbert dominates the book. Even Charles Badgery is really a way of defining Herbert – a necessary ...”

“... engineer in Star Trek. From its stilted feel, one often suspects that Hardy’s Queen’s English may have been similarly tin-eared. Thackeray and Surtees are Phillipps’s other favourite sources. But good reporters of their age and class as these writers were, there are caveats to using them as this study sometimes does. Thackeray, more often than not, sets ...”

“... into shooting’, makes one very curious as to whether some of the film’s final portentousness may be the responsibility of Wenders rather than Shepard. Like William Carlos Williams, Shepard came and took a hard look at Europe, then turned his back on it. He remains resolutely a Redskin. His achievement has been to avoid the naivety and macho ...”

“... a somewhat limited imagination he drew for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhausting and exasperating this may have been, but it wasn’t, as West concludes, ‘soul-destroying work’. We can set aside the excessive claims West makes for individual pieces, as well as the illfounded suggestion that Orwell was a major innovator in arts broadcasting, anticipating the ...”

“... upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives bringing on attacks of déjà vu. Why, then, is Mellow offering this third Fitzgerald biography in five years? His answer: Invented Lives isn’t just another biography. It has a thesis. What thesis? That Scott and Zelda ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... power and established position, and that the notion of concessions to their independent demands may need rethinking. The concept of the aristocratic bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie apeing aristocratic airs and graces, is currently attracting attention in discussions of the formation of the middle class. It is a concept with problems about the evidence and about ...”

“... 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 ...”