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“... do very much better if they are to win a general election. The Tories still have two problems. The first is to find issues on which they differ from Labour. They have persistently let Labour off the hook because they largely agree with Labour’s more unpopular policies. Unfortunately for them they have little choice here. To disagree with Labour on such ...”

“... intellectually and morally when called on to respond to the customs of other races. They failed, first, to consider the possibility that practices which appeared to them to be oppressive might not actually be so; second, to understand that ‘modes of femininity’ (a felicitously non-judgmental expression) cannot in themselves be held to indicate the level ...”

“... inactive – and the pressure to do something may include violent and murderous acts – then the first thing to do is to locate this attitude in its contemporary context. The same holds for the Christian anti-abortion movement, who also find it ‘impossible to remain silent’ in the face of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foetuses every year, a ...”

“... to which she used them as vital elements in her psychodrama. Anne Stevenson deftly begins her first chapter with such a moment. Sylvia, aged 14, was highly praised by her English teacher for a group of poems, including particularly one called ‘I thought that I could not be hurt’. ‘Incredible,’ said a fellow teacher, ‘that one so young could have ...”

“... to Rodin’ show in the United States last year. The catalogue for this provides the first good general discussion of French 19th-century sculpture in English yet published, unless one counts the excellent but very much shorter piece by Ruth Butler (then Mirolli) in the catalogue of the similar but smaller ...”

“... of offence by a charming mixture of passionate concern and playful delight in irony. There is first the obvious irony that, in a peripeteia worthy of the Deuteronomist, he has turned the tables on those who denied the existence of the gods of other religions. But he is aware also of the irony that all he says about the Bible could be applied to his own ...”

“... limb: ‘The inexperienced dismemberer, and let’s face it most of us are, will probably attempt first to cut through the long bones. If they do, they will very swiftly find that this is an extremely difficult task. It requires the right tools, plenty of time, a suitable location and a good deal of stamina.’ The entry following ‘dismemberment’ is ...”

“... to one than I was obliged to try on another. Seduced by a pretty cover, I picked up Rachel Ingalls first. Three of a Kind contains, as one might expect, three stories, each with a tendency to run to fifty pages, although one falls short. The first of them bears the ominous title ‘I see a long journey’, and game for ...”

“... Singer and, in the most recent Zuckerman novel, Henry Roth. But Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud’s first biographer, persuasively argues that the house, the wife, the joylessness and the drive are all echt Malamud. ‘If you think of me sitting at my desk, you can’t be wrong,’ Malamud once wrote to a friend he would not make the time to see. He had little ...”

“... last year. Among the titles expected to be in particular demand is a biography of Janos Kadar, First Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Party. It is by Laszlo Gyurko, and will be part of a larger study of Kadar to be published later this year by Pergamon Press. During my visit I am informed that this first-ever ...”

“... is to blame? Much of the press coverage has focused on the staffing crisis that emerged in the first year of the pandemic. More and more officers began to call in sick, or else requested restrictive-duty assignments that prevent them from working with people in custody. At one point, some two thousand guards (around a third of the daily workforce) were ...”

“... undertow slowly reveals itself. You’ll know it now, but probably you missed it, as I did, the first time, as you missed the heavy winter suit Joe was wearing when he dropped in at the house of the woman next door. The sugar mice, the cherry print on Nina’s new bikini. The ball of hair in the Andalusian almond soup. The impact on everybody of Isabel’s ...”

“... would establish themselves in due course. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798) had argued that human populations carry on growing until their needs exceed the supply of sustenance; and when Darwin read it in 1838 he extended the principle to all forms of life, suggesting that ‘the supply of food’ provides an ...”

“... it was also home to Austria’s easternmost fortress. Barely a month after the beginning of the First World War, that fortress fell to the Russian army, marking the start of decades of struggle to control (and rename) the city. It shifted back and forth between Austria and Russia during the Great War: ‘Lemberg ist noch in unserem Besitz’ (‘Lemberg is ...”

“... So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure ...”