“... with irony and sophistication. But Mahler would never admit that he was an entertainer. It may seem inappropriate to characterise the high priests of Modernism in terms usually reserved for the producers of Hollywood blockbusters, but it is worth bearing in mind that just before Schoenberg discovered atonality he wrote Gurrelieder, the splashiest ...”

“... amusing prose poem of metropolitan servant life, without speculating on how much the young Dickens may have owed to Hunt. In relation to such ‘Cockney’ subjects, both writers displayed a delicate play of the sympathetic and the facetious, and an imagination that was, to a startling degree, urban (i.e. fanciful, artificial, deliciously contrived). And one ...”

“... his reply to Burke in ‘an octavo form so as to confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly’ (that is, people who would be unlikely to approve of it), but that as soon as it was published more ‘cheaply for dissemination among the populace’ (that is, among people who would agree with it), he would be prosecuted. A year ...”

“... What Death of a Salesman can’t be is a play about whether reality is real. Willy Loman may well be – as Bigsby argues – a man ‘finally unable to separate reality from appearance’, but we only know that because we can. Miller found a highly original way of dramatising the gap between the American dream and its achievement, and did it so ...”

“... past as if it were the present is vulnerable: the past/ present becomes a double-edged sword. You may be sued if you call anybody here a ‘Nazi’, but one hears it a lot. It would be more appropriate to compare Israeli brutality with the French in Algeria, or the British in Sudan or Malaysia, but we are taken up with the notion of ‘our past turning into ...”

“... it up, even in the North-West. And while Lennon had his self-indulgent and self-pitying side, and may well have said, ‘I like to write about me’ (as opposed to the outgoing McCartney), we are after all talking about the man who wrote ‘Revolution’, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’. If his desire to steer an even course between contradictory ...”

“... sharp commentator on her previous life and lifestyle in Britain. Fifty years in America may not entirely have changed the way she wrote and, presumably, spoke, but it certainly made her background seem increasingly distant. True, she never quite lost the knack of blending into British elite society; in fact, she had such a romantic attachment to the ...”

“... surgery and the free expression of sex, has become a major preoccupation in Colombia. The Church may rant against abortion and women’s scanty clothing, but in bookshops such beguiling works as The Kama Sutra for Lesbians are on prominent display, while next door Italian sneakers might be on sale for $290. Like all the other barrios in Medellín – and ...”

“... a natural home in Britain’, yet ends it with a warning that ‘the carnage of Baghdad may well erupt in Bradford and Birmingham.’ One of the few places where Husain felt comfortable in Saudi Arabia (or anywhere else) was close to the mausoleum of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, where he smelled musk rose drifting from the alleys. Yet he lives in ...”

“... has a big price tag: once only high-energy physics and astronomy were hugely expensive; now you may need many millions to be a serious player in genomics and other areas of molecular biology. More generally, science, like all kinds of other claimants to public funding, functions in a scarcity economy, the legacy of the ‘anti-government, anti-tax politics ...”

“... suspected ‘post-mortem room and anatomy room porters’ and speculated that ‘imitative action may have come into play.’ He suggested the killings were acts of emulation, committed by more than one maniac, possibly including someone bent on ‘world regeneration’. Whatever the truth of this, the phrase ‘Jack the Ripper’ represented a gothic state ...”

“... is that what determines the meaning of such sentences is what routinely makes them true. One may feel a twinge of nostalgia for ‘paradigm case arguments’ and other such follies of one’s youth. I don’t think this kind of argument works very well either. Sceptics are worried that maybe there’s nothing out there. So, if refuting sceptics is the ...”

“... moments when a trip to the back of the book does not explain what is going on at the front. Pigman may have fallen for Gascoigne’s habitual trick of tempting readers to impute factual origins to his verse when he assumes that the complaints composed in the voice of women were ‘written for a particular person’. Ventriloquism was surely his ...”

“... recorded by an observer with Médecins sans Frontières – were common in Rwanda in April and May 1994, when Hutu extremists butchered up to a million people, mainly Tutsis but also Hutu moderates who were seen as ‘sell-outs’. The small United Nations force under Major-General Roméo Dallaire and the gallant contingent of the International Committee ...”

“... Germany. ‘If we . . . can’t despite everything be at least optimistic for ourselves then we may as well pack up.’ Politically, it was more complicated: ‘My university comrades and I are racking our brains as to what kinds of intervention in the life of civil society we might make. We are completely at a loss as to where we, especially as Jews, can ...”