“... This book needs to be handled with care. It may be other than it seems. Possibly the publishers were uncertain about what they had got; so am I. The author is well-known: ‘Colin Turnbull is Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University in Washington DC. He has lived and worked in India and central and eastern Africa ...”

“... the back or the lid of a small panel painting – would merit this sort of exegesis, but here they may not. Lightbown is as keen to expand on the historical events, recorded in published and in manuscript sources, which provided the occasion for Mantegna’s paintings as he is to investigate the objects depicted in them, and this, also, is often of great ...”

“... his reputation is surrounded by rumour, misinformation, disinformation. Shady and unpleasant he may have been, Nicholl says, but we owe him something – not simply because he was a great dramatist and poet, but because his death was murder, and the crime is unsolved. Nicholl is an investigator with a compelling sense of duty to the past and the people who ...”

“... is, what political responsibility means?’ I said: ‘For all we know, Somalia’s warring clans may be fewer in number than its peace-loving nationals, many of whom pursue sedentary vocations. It is those of us of the nomadic stock who are more vocal, and who claim to be the prototype Somali. To my mind, we’re bellicose beasts, forever at each other’s ...”

“... must have a mother to protect him... don’t you remember the night Monty was born?’) may have helped to harden her heart, however much she really did love and need her own children. As Worthen remarks, the battery of letters from Weekley and his family and friends, as well as from her own family, may have ...”

“... It appears only fitfully in the abandoned novel ‘Mood’, which dates from 1926 but which Green may have gone on struggling with after Living. Both the fragment and Green’s rueful discussion of it in 1960 are included in Surviving. He deplores ‘Mood’s technical shortcomings and his inability to profit from the kindly advice of Edward Garnett ...”

“... major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis wandered from Trotskyism into the ‘bourgeois deviationism’ of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The heteroclite ruminations ...”

“... casts a statistical suspicion on neighbours, friends and family.These enduring habits of thought may explain why, contrary to popular myth, it is on the whole far from easy to pursue complaints of sexual misconduct. Barriers to complaint are created not only by sexist attitudes, but also by the ways in which institutions work to protect themselves from ...”

“... brain is essentially the same as in the old body (no strange hormonal rushes). Even so, there may be limits on how different one’s new body can be if one is to remain the same person. I may feel I’m most essentially a mental self, that my identity is in some deep way independent of my body, but ‘I am not merely ...”

“... a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must. There is no one to blame.Except that this is not the way things happen, only the way we have been taught to see them, by epic poets and the news camera. ‘Our grief is not Greek,’ Auden adds, meaning that the story of our time is not helpless ...”

“... mid-forties and below, while in Europe and America it is predicted that within a few decades we may live to a hundred years or more. HIV/Aids spreads unusually slowly for an unchecked epidemic. The graph of an epidemic in the acute stage is like a slanted ‘S’. From a single case, the number of people with the disease accelerates until it reaches a ...”

“... I had in the Wimpole Street days of adoration, – & now I begin to wonder naturally whether I may not be some sort of a real angel after all. It is not so bad a thing, be sure, for a woman to be loved by a man of imagination – He loves her through a lustrous atmosphere, which not only keeps back the faults, but produces a continual novelty, through its ...”

“... afresh their ornaments, especially the early ones of notably Byzantine character, since these may be taken to support the case for exotic influence. His conclusion, which is sure to be controversial but will be very difficult to refute, is that the Venetian palace is entirely European in origin, a very ingenious derivative of a type found in many parts of ...”

“... has done the flesh and someone else the fruit, the different ways of showing bloom and shine may not go together – an over-finished bunch of grapes can have too much of the jam label about it Generally, however, the work of others can be seamlessly incorporated. Before himself going abroad, Van Dyck had access to the digested versions of what Rubens ...”

“... battered pick-up – ‘Excellent Construction’ – might apply to the novel as a whole. It may be wrong, in any case, to draw large distinctions between travel books and novels. As Raban argues, his travel narratives – like those of W.G. Sebald – are fictions. They are not transcriptions, rattled out as the journey progresses, but artful ...”