“... in the notion of Baudelaire as an ‘icon of modernity’, yet Baudelaire’s own writings betray little enthusiasm for progress or the future: ‘Poetry and progress,’ he observed, ‘are two ambitious men that hate each other, with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along a pathway one or other must give way.’ But it was exactly Baudelaire’s ...”

“... of short stories, but in their uncertain state they are of interest mainly to scholars and hold little appeal for the ordinary reader, who invariably comes to Lowry after discovering the masterful Under the Volcano, in the hope that there will be more of the same. There isn’t, and knowing this, Hofmann wisely gives us only excerpts from the rest. His ...”

“... fingers had swollen – she was six months pregnant. This wasn’t merely torture, the activist Allan Boesak recalled, but a ‘demonstration’. The attackers – it is believed – were from the Security Police, specifically the notorious ‘Hammer Unit’, whose members used their own personal weapons and would drive into the townships ‘dressed as ...”

“... observers had perceived a barren wilderness.’ He found numerous hitherto unknown works and little-known artists, and was able to do this by virtue of ‘a breadth of experience which he alone possessed, after many years of scrutinising pictures in private collections and the sale rooms, and of collecting information from catalogues, archives and ...”

“... mystery of “origination”’ to be ‘one of the great creative forces’, and had little interest in revealing the truth about a father who turns out to have been a maritally entangled commercial traveller and the black sheep of a respectable Glasgow family. Bundling up her infant, Janet withdrew from Blairgowrie to the Spittal of ...”

“... his time in California, Crary taught at UC San Diego, where he met the performance artists Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin, whose work he discussed in terms derived from Henri Lefebvre, the first theorist of ‘everyday life’, and Deleuze and Guattari, who celebrated ‘nomadic’ ways of being. Crary describes Kaprow as troubling ‘the differences ...”

“... Yengeni (an African and an SACP member) into standing aside to allow the Coloured ex-clergyman, Allan Boesak, to assume the ANC chairmanship of the region. This was hotly resented by local Coloured Communists such as Cheryl Carolus and Trevor Manuel – for Boesak is a high liver, much given to expensive houses, cars and restaurants. However, despite the ...”

“... state unburdened by high salaries for civil and military officers. This meant that there was little pressure to reform positions that depended on the collection of fees; it also ensured a general tolerance of the petty corruption practised by needy customs officers. Seventeenth-century republican demands for selfless officials working under the scrutiny ...”

“... about his famous mentor and the thanatological work on which they collaborated, but he gets a little carried away when he says, about the reception given to On Death and Dying, that it was ‘as if the event of death had not occurred’ before the book was published in 1969. Emerson, writing his journal in January 1842 as a newly bereaved father, seems ...”

“... imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy. As with similar images of Baudelaire by Nadar and ...”

“... the multiversity, said Kerr, is unloved. There are no pious founders, no portraits in hall, little campus lore or tales of unworldly professors. The very mention of the neologism instantly conjures up the hateful association ‘bureaucracy’. No one can love the multiversity even with its satellite ‘colleges of letters and science’ as Americans ...”

“... adduces a whole range of commemorative practices that others simply ignore and which clearly have little if anything to do with Modernism. Germans, for example, could buy books that described how to make crosses and other signs of mourning from nails. A whole range of memorials, from little cast-iron statues of Hindenburg ...”

“... not otherwise have read. The undergraduates in those days were 90 per cent American and knew very little about Europe. To help them, I found it useful to make constant comparisons between the US, the UK, France and Germany. I myself took graduate courses on the Soviet Union, Asia, the US and Western Europe. Finally, the format of the Southeast Asia programme ...”

“... chapter of Woman: An Intimate Geography is devoted to a spirited defence of the aggression of little girls (a resolute cheerfulness, or ‘chirpy wellness’, to use Angier’s own expression, pervades the book): ‘the hyena girls, the leopard girls, the coyote and the crow girls ... the living, seething, aggressive girls who are the only girls I have ...”

“... but not all there: a man of hollow promises, fundamentally unreliable. Sometimes he seemed to be little more than a lazy impersonator of his own cherished self-image – airy, cunning, one of life’s happy drifters. He ended up in the penitentiary, following a poor attempt at forgery. If he’d only been a tiny bit smarter, he might have made one hell of a ...”