“... 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 ...”

“... Too honest to ignore the similarity to supposed Puritan ideals of the work of the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford, who wrote in the 1520s, Collinson is compelled to treat Catholic Humanists as proto-Puritans – which weakens his claim that it was Puritan divines who held a distinctively Puritan attitude to the family. Moreover, he is led into caricaturing ...”

“... figures. He notes that people who have never visited museums feel that there are too many words to read. One is surprised that they were permitted (or could be bothered) to fill in this part of a questionnaire, but their response does at least suggest that some of the less educated members of the public would not appreciate having information about the class ...”

“... difficult days. He soon dominated the proceedings by the quickness of his wit and his ability to read and to lead the Deputies’ mood. Others were more popular (criticism of him from within has recently grown) but they were identified with particular factions or groups, which only Khasbulatov seemed able to span; as the Parliament turned against the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of that event the detachment and disenchantment necessary to shatter accepted orthodoxies. Thus Richard Cobb’s vivid writings have shown how little the Revolution affected many of the poorest and most peripheral Frenchmen. More subversive still, it was another British scholar, Alfred Cobban, who demolished the long-accepted Marxist notion that the ...”

“... John Moore, and his uncle Thomas Arthur. There, in the parlour, Mistress Benchkin asked him to read out her new will, which he did ‘plainely and distinktly’, and shortly afterwards signed the will in witness. The will was discovered by another Canterbury burrower, Frank Tyler, in 1939. It is the only known example of Marlowe’s signature, and ...”

“... contract what they do not trust political consensus to deliver. Gould’s book is a chatty, brisk read that covers many of the crucial questions that health policy must address, and begins at exactly the right point: by asking what we think doctors are really for. He points out that ‘there is a wide range of different kinds of doctor,’ and therefore ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... luxury of cleanliness’, especially pernicious to women in childbirth. It is impossible to read this book without marvelling at the rich blend of credulity and chicanery that characterised medical practice, and at the docility with which patients submitted to manifestly absurd and even injurious ‘cures’. The doctors, we learn from Corbin’s new ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fatalism. After this some more positive argument is clearly in order. So later in the chapter we read: ‘I am inclined to think’ – the hesitancy warns of strong stuff to come – ‘that a very important aspect’ of the danger of aggression ‘is in fact this same quarrelsomeness in controversy which has led the human race to squander its intellectual ...”

“... 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 ...”