“... varied aspects to explore, as was shown in Michael Holquist’s Dostoevsky and the Novel and by Richard Peace’s remarkable examination, in Dostoevsky: The Major Novels, of its catacomb of religious symbolism and clash of hidden dogmas. It is a quarry for quite separate lines and kinds of study, like a work of the Renaissance. Like a play of that time, as ...”

“... son of a high official working for the shah. Homa Katouzian, his previous biographer in English, ascribes his consistent opposition to ‘any concession to any foreign power’ to this early impression of popular anger at European encroachments on Iran’s sovereignty. Mossadegh, whose family belonged to the nobility and who was honoured as a child ...”

“... The Power Elite, The Organisation Man, The Feminine Mystique and The Making of the English Working Class – you’ll find they depict a world moving towards an almost claustrophobic cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with ...”

“... ragged plastic: a loud fake, a deterrent to keep random passerines and crapping gulls off honest English soil. It shrieked and hissed in the wind, lacking claws and beak. The passengers heading for the pier didn’t even notice it. If you travel against the inrushing City surge, the cattled mob decanted at Fenchurch Street station, a railway excursion to the ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... voices; Salford’s city fathers complained that she was bringing their city into disrepute; Richard Hoggart, whose landmark study of working-class culture, The Uses of Literacy, had appeared the previous year, objected that Delaney’s characters were ‘not typical’ of the working class. Very tall, striking and photogenic, Delaney found herself ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... about metaphysics: they parted with their entrance fee not for the sake of enlightenment but, as Richard Altick once put it, out of a simple – no doubt very human – ‘desire to be baffled’. The bafflement was sustained on both sides of the Atlantic for more than sixty years, but in the 1830s it was revealed that Kempelen and later proprietors of the ...”

“... Schoenbaum. He was right, though no one was especially impressed by the stunt; Schoenbaum had the English Department secretary reply to the letter. When Foster finished the book, he submitted it, was turned down again, and pulled the same trick again, this time identifying the anonymous reader as Stanley Wells. Foster wrote to Wells, without letting on how he ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”

“... under review here. Die Logik der Forschung was published in 1934 but was not translated into English until 1959. The Postscript has been circulated like samizdat since 1957 but is only now available in published form. Of its three volumes, the second has been discussed in these columns already (Vol. 5, No 15), while the third is on quantum physics. The ...”

“... psychological or a physical illness. Sceptics, such as Elaine Showalter, an American professor of English whose 1997 book about hysteria included a controversial chapter on CFS, point out that, despite extensive research, nobody yet knows what causes ME. It often occurs after a virus, but there is no evidence of prolonged viral infection. There is still no ...”

“... the reader is reminded of theories, now abandoned, giving a whirlwind rate of replacement of the English aristocracy in the 15th century. Nor is it as easy as it seems to avoid, or to use, anecdotal evidence and ‘the collection of stray items from diverse sources’. Garnsey and Saller think it likely that young men, even those in their ...”

“... it must lie elsewhere. Between Facts and Norms, out in German since 1992 but newly translated into English, seeks to justify neutrality by a different route: through the conditions which make public political discourse possible. Faktizität und Geltung, the book’s German title, is none too helpfully rendered by Between Facts and Norms, since one of ...”