“... in a cramped flat in West London.’ My response to Josipovici’s novel is mixed. It’s easy to read, but hard to understand. There is a part of me that responds with: perhaps me no perhapses, Josipovici, tell me what’s going on, for God’s sake, or give the reader back his £7.95. Another part of me dutifully applauds the critic-novelist’s intricate ...”

“... biographers, these two books are emphatically the fruits of his own immense labours. He has read everything that has been published on the subject; he has talked to everyone remotely connected with Elgar, including his daughter Carice, who did not die until 1970; and he has made unprecedentedly full use of the rich Elgar archives at Broadheath and in ...”

“... rather perfunctory and anecdotal. It is a pity, too, that little of their accompanying text can be read here, since Arbus considered herself in part a writer, and her photo-essays take on a whimsical humour from her faux-naif prose and deadpan captions that is not otherwise apparent. None of these undoubted handicaps can excuse the bad writing and shoddy ...”

“... in philosophy. He was a friend of Coleridge, and was one of the first people in Britain to read Kant. Kant had written about pure space as a realisation of geometry: it was Hamilton’s attempt to construct a corresponding algebra of pure time that led him eventually to quaternions. Professor Hankins apparently accepts Hamilton’s own assertion that ...”

“... her analysis of the family life of the Byrons and Lovelaces, has about as much sentimentality as Richard Dawkins’s description of the strategy of the cuckoo. She is also a clear writer on the abject role demanded of women, and particularly insistent on the realities of physical suffering, and of 19th-century medical practice. This combination of freedom ...”

“... impressive. As a result, in no other literature is the writer so much a performing self, as Richard Poirier has observed, and in no other literature is such a premium placed on raw data and its virtuoso delivery. The American interest in ‘fact’ derives from the same complex of attitudes. One can see it not only in the regularly contemptuous ...”

“... this again, as Przeworksi puts it in quite the most incisive essay on the New Right that I’ve read, would seem to mean freeing ‘accumulation from all the fetters imposed on it by democracy’. It would seem to mean completing that bourgeois revolution which, in Britain, was arrested at its outset and has been frustrated ever since by that long line of ...”

“... of the disease, as presented by Bell and referred to by Orbach: a first medical sighting by Richard Morton and described in his Treatise on Consumption of 1687, Naudeau’s account of a fatal case of self-starvation in 1789, in which the victim’s mother was clearly implicated; William Gull’s and Charles Lasegue’s independent recognition of ...”

“... with that ‘poet, playwright, critic, editor and publisher’, T.S. Eliot (whose later life, Richard Ellmann informs us, ‘became rather stately’): ‘I did not know death had undone so many.’ When originally conceived, Lee observed that ‘national biography must be prepared to satisfy the commemorative instinct of all sections of the ...”

“... who started moving in their own directions after the Sex Pistols showed the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck of stories less mythical perhaps ...”

“... of the dialectical interplay of war and of its paradoxical logic. Memo to aspiring strategists: read the Portal-WSC exchange of memoranda word by word. The platoon also has a section of biographers, with Robert Rhodes James, of C: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 and Lord Randolph Churchill, here present in a chatty round-up that is mere fluff; Paul ...”

“... a Gurney concordance would be for ‘glow’, ‘shine’, ‘fire’, ‘sun’, ‘stars’.He read Keats and, to drown out the noise of the machine guns, played Bach and Elgar in his head. He set John Masefield’s ‘By a Bierside’ to music while sitting on a sandbag (the manuscript is stained with mud). He sent his poems to Marion Scott, along with ...”

“... just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA certificate, from which I learned, incidentally, that it was introduced in July 1970 and dropped in September 1982 to make way for the 15 certificate still in use ...”

“... displays a happy balance between scholarship and readability. Its directness shows that Bartlett read Augustine in Latin (cur et mortui tanta possunt?) – the published translations are much wordier. Bartlett identifies the three essentials for a saint cult as ‘name, body, text’. Names might be confused and texts could be commissioned, but a body, or at ...”

“... endorsed the comparison; though he only knew of À la recherche late in life when his third wife read aloud to him from Un amour de Swann. He told Le Monde in 1985: ‘I would, of course, have been delighted to meet Proust, though I’m not sure a rabbit can talk to a cat.’ In June 1913 his mother took him to a performance of The Rite of Spring conducted ...”