“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish ...”

“... then than it would now. The enterprise on which Liddell and Scott had embarked was perhaps more central to Victorian high culture (the culture that produced Jowett, Matthew Arnold and Housman) than the Oxford English Dictionary itself. There was humour in Liddell and Scott, or so we were told, but it was donnish to the point of desiccation. The entry ...”

“... form the letter g. Other letters followed, until by the end of the week I was unable to produce more than a scrawl. Not even a treasured fountain pen could save it. It all became, as Anne Carson on behalf of us Parkinsonians says, ugly.* What happened next was entirely unexceptional. In Oxford, where I had become a visiting professor, the neurologist, a ...”

“... Bartholomeus Breenbergh, to contemporary British artists such as Amelia Long, Paul Sandby and Thomas Gainsborough, a selection of which are on display. His admiration for Claude Lorrain led him to acquire more than 270 of Lorrain’s landscape drawings, seven of which are included in the show.Of particular interest ...”

“... Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful ...”

“... Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law more comic than reprehensible. He thought poverty was indeed a cause of crime, and liked to give first-time offenders a second chance. He was the exact opposite of Fielding the magistrate, who set out his views on crime in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late ...”

“... Freud returning to his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) with a new idiom, but no more neurology, on offer. Anna Freud makes no objection to the late system, though she skirts warily round parts of it – describing the death instinct, for instance, without relish. Where some strain shows is with Femininity’: yet the editor’s faith is such ...”

“... urban haunt, was himself a major contributor to the Past and Present series. His new book is a more than worthy member of the illustrious company it seeks to keep. Sustained by a mellifluous style, meticulous scholarship, a powerful historical imagination and profound human sympathy, it is, if not definitive, then at least as good a book as one can readily ...”

“... Empire. In America, by contrast, slavery was a political and social problem. What would happen if more than half a million slaves were suddenly freed? The received wisdom of many observers in the early republic, from Jefferson to Tocqueville, was that blacks and whites would engage in a genocidal war. Before the Abolition Act of 1833, Britain had managed to ...”

“... concerns of its particular milieu. In Reading for Our Time, J. Hillis Miller is moved to comment more than once on this passage about a spectator alone with a view. To readers familiar with Miller, it will come as no surprise. In a literary journey that has now reached its seventh decade (his first book appeared in the 1950s), Miller has often stopped to ...”

“... music and painting maintains a judicious critical distance from its subject. Readers who wish a more direct report from the front lines of the avant-garde should consult a new anthology, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy.* This documents the work of almost two hundred avant-gardists from Europe and America who ...”

“... inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff wall. Even more of them imitated the grimmer scenes he adopted in the second half of his career, in which a scrawny arm and corrugated brow are sharply lit against deep shadow. His art was subjected to stern strictures by some of the most eloquent critics and theorists in ...”

“... British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than most literary phenomena, names in fiction seem very straightforward until you start to think about them. The simple question, ‘why does a name sound right?’ leads to a whole range of questions. Are there rules about how names are given to ...”

“... of class-conflicts. In a great novel – so Lukács – in a major fiction by Balzac, Tolstoy or Thomas Mann, the ripening of the epic and of tragic and comic drama is harvested and given full deployment. It is only minor, ephemeral fiction, by which Lukács intends psychological miniaturism on the one hand and naturalism or verismo on the other, which seeks ...”

“... used to exist, as an ex-Tyneham resident complained: there was only ‘Purbeck Valley’. The more general military takeover of Purbeck, temporary in its first execution, made permanent in due course through various bureaucratic and Parliamentary sleights-of-hand, goes back to 1916, when Bindon Hill became the testing-ground of the newly created Tank ...”