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“... In his lucid and bold meditation on the aesthetics of the extraordinary in art and science, Philip Fisher seeks to restore it to its Cartesian pride of place as a passion fit for grownups and intellectuals. It is a tonic to put down the latest issue of a scholarly journal and pick up this short but ample book, in which ...”

“... may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the passions. His argument is that we underestimate the positive potential of the ‘vehement passions’, long understood only as forces that ...”

“... by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and ...”

“... in a brilliant new book on this Emersonian vision and the economic order it celebrates,† Philip Fisher argues that democratic social space in America depends on and fosters what he calls ‘a culture of abstraction’, atomistic, unbounded and transparent. The United States lacks virtually all of those elements that, to European thinkers of the ...”

“... Britain and the Continent. There are apparently honourable exceptions to this rule, including Philip Fisher and Jean-Christophe Agnew, ‘yet Americanists writing about sentimentality rarely cite them (nor, for that matter, do they cite each other).’ Howard’s own chapter on sentimentality makes a valiant effort to get beyond stale debates about ...”

“... regrets and frustrations of his literary generation. He was a mixture of Pan and Peter Pan. Clive Fisher, who has written a very good book on Noel Coward, was quite right to give this elegant study the subtitle ‘A Nostalgic Life’. Being Anglo-Irish helped the nostalgia. Connolly senior had been a Major in the British Army and when he retired became an ...”

“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”

“... be no occasions of it. The first two occasions offered dismal precedents. Mary I’s consort, King Philip of Spain, was dangerously powerful in his own right, and only Mary’s barrenness saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s ...”

“... details shows us why the same phenomenon is to be expected in other years as well. Since R.A. Fisher’s work on selection for sex ratios, we’ve had a better explanation. Fisher pointed out that if the sex ratio in a species like ours departs from one to one at the time of sexual maturity there will be a selective ...”

“... and, despite Darwin, the natural world could be studied safely by the pious with the aid of Philip Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope. Potter, with her brother’s microscope and the encouragement of her father, developed into an accomplished naturalist and botanical artist. It was the ideal childhood for a writer, intense, isolated and untrammelled ...”

“... of the sea: in Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Marseille is mentioned so often that when you turn to its entry in the book’s index, you find no page numbers, just a word – passim. Lauso la mare e tente’n terro – praise the sea and stay on the land – is a Provençal proverb, and Marseille ...”

“... whores, dying horses and abandoned children. In The Element of Crime (1984), a ravaged cop called Fisher (Michael Elphick) struggles through a flooded landscape, trying to solve a crime. Fisher is a particularly bad detective: he has an affair with a prostitute who turns out to have been the lover of the murderer he is ...”

“... to join the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Eliot and Pound never happened. Tomlinson refuses to put the clock back to pretend that after Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens have written in ...”

“... had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers, Philip Tate?’ The question is left hanging but the answer, in Tate’s case, is that this little practical joke would surely have gone out into the world without its best gag. Had the guests at Modern Painters’ New York party read The New Confessions, for ...”

“... young woman loaned by the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull whom I’d most like to know. She surely gave Philip Larkin the cue when he wished for a friend’s newborn daughter to be neither ‘ugly nor good-looking/Nothing uncustomary’, but bent on that ‘unemphasised, enthralled/Catching of happiness’ that sustains a well-lived life.Encounters are Hals’s ...”