“... it will be a waste of my time making an application for bail because no matter how sympathetic he may be to the arguments advanced on behalf of my client, he is not prepared to grant it, even technically, because Mr X is a serving prisoner. His decision is expressed in fluent legalese with mention of statutory powers and sub-sections of the Bail Act and is ...”

“... as part of the content of any serious work – a collapse given a final push by the events of May’68. As a variety of cultural spaces were then requisitioned and occupied by their users – students at the Sorbonne, for example – and as the authorities began to move against these occupations, two things became clear to the participants. One was that ...”

“... through his mind had Phoebus cast The radiance of his own divinity. Nearer the gods no mortal may approach. Halley meant it – he was in love with Newton’s ‘divine Treatise’ – and history has repaid him accordingly. To the late Victorians Halley was a Good Second: ‘the second most illustrious of Anglo-Saxon philosophers’. If you want to ...”

“... in my head, my sons are to bring together all the fragments without any determinate title that I may leave, from the most extensive down to fragments of a single line, prose or verse, order them as best they can, and publish them under the title of Ocean.’ Against this old man of the sea, however, you have in fairness to set the alternative man who is well ...”

“... not of a sovereign state but of one republic of the Soviet Union, the Constitutional Court may be persuaded to allow him to run again – should he decide he wants a third term. But if he does and he wins, Russia will find itself, once more, with an ailing head of state. The alternative is for Yeltsin to start grooming a successor, but that, too, is ...”

“... backwardness and isolation. For the present turbo-capitalism cannot long endure either: indeed, it may already be coming to an end. Even in the free-market mecca of Hong Kong the Government is spending its hard-currency reserves to keep up both the Hong Kong dollar and the stock market. The Russians have no such reserves, but they, too, have an already ...”

“... the ultimate expression of Popular Front corniness.) Yet however bogus or middlebrow the results may have been, the Popular Front generated a popular culture – which was an alternative to Hollywood’s universalising dream factory. The problem was that this culture had also to be politically reliable. Its dreams were regulated. The New Left which emerged ...”

“... that removed her from life, but in a different sense to the one she intended. Margaret Forster may have been right not to select from Aurora Leigh in her choice of the poems, since she could not give it all, yet the first part of it shows most about what might be called, in relation to Elizabeth and her husband, the Browning method. How intensely bookish ...”

“... imposition of the fraud. On the contrary, his now legendary staying-power is compatible with and may even depend upon a widespread popular acceptance of a gap between performance and reality. The reality never comes into focus – even Rogin hesitates to say whether Reagan is the unconscious instrument of psychosocial forces beyond his control or the cunning ...”

“... Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may define itself against the run of post-war anthologies, but it does no favours for its contributors, whose work, itself doing no favours for the unprepared general reader, looks to have been written according to a set of undisclosed codes and precepts. It is ...”

“... many who do not share its views. The authors conclude, with some reason, that while the Eighties may be the decade of Mrs Thatcher, they have not been a decade of popular Thatcherism. The 1987 survey also throws light on another aspect of politics which has returned to centre-stage in early 1988 – the Liberal-SDP Alliance. It suggests that the attitudes of ...”

“... Where were John Stalker’s principles then? This brief diversion into Greater Manchester affairs may help to put the Stalker controversy into some kind of context. The parallels are not coincidental. They stem from an overriding belief in the Police establishment that they know best, and from an implicit understanding that the ends justify the means. The ...”

“... Emerald Cunard remarking to Cyril Connolly that Hemingway struck her ‘as androgynous’. ‘You may think it bizarre of me.’ she added, ‘It is not the mot juste perhaps. But that is how he struck me.’ Bizarre no more. For if Lynn occasionally pushes the envelope (as they are supposed to say in test-flying circles) his thesis convinces. Why is it ...”

“... the six-page sportive essay, he brought to perfection. That the form has now more or less died may be partly because Perelman did it so well there was nowhere left for it to go. One of his most treasured accolades came from Robert Benchley, who wrote that Perelman did to our weak little efforts at ‘crazy stuff’ what Benny Goodman has done to ...”

“... has ridden out many revolts before now. The Pope’s extraordinary claims to moral authority may have received some challenge in Managua but that hardly constitutes three falls and a submission. What beats me is that O’Brien should ever have expected the Pope to behave differently: the man gets a weekly briefing from the CIA’s Rome ...”