“... and we may suppose that his hero is not, let us say, like the significant madman in Pirandello’s Henry IV. Auerbach’s truth is far from incomprehensible: all the same, entertainers have their own way of making judgments and suggestions, and Cervantes makes some that are acknowledged by Auerbach himself. Symbolic, quixotic conceptions based on this text ...”

“... the Foucaultian sleight-of-hand completes itself – ‘a function of considerable investments of power ... most visible in medicine and in law.’ What makes The Freudian Body, nevertheless, absorbing is its readiness to move beyond or ‘back from’ theory. Prompted by a hint in the Leonardo essay (1910) that ‘a component instinct of sexual desire’ may ...”

“... much of the hussy in Margaret Oliphant, who was shy, sharp-witted and buck-toothed; according to Henry James, her physiognomy was ‘that of a person whose eggs are not all in one basket’. The daughter of a Midlothian clerk, she published her first novel when she was 21, and married her cousin – a designer of stained glass – three years later; by the ...”

“... the most rewarding pages come near the beginning. A politician who believes he can still win power is likely to present himself in the best of lights, or at least suppress any awkward self-knowledge he may happen to possess. But the early facts are beguiling. Bob first saw Eth when she was dancing in a theatre in the Cumbrian port of Workington in ...”

“... muliebre’) was an element in a nun’s attire – because he had read a satire on Sir Henry Vane which said ‘They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat,/They’d send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat’ – is something of an old chestnut, but there are some other less well-known juicy bits here. The late 18th-century use of the word ...”

“... tatters’; ‘Mainstream May reaches out to Labour heartlands’; ‘We will use SNP to give us power, says Labour’; ‘May woos working classes with tough line on Brexit’; ‘Tories savage Labour “triple tax whammy”.’ (The Financial Times described Corbyn as a ‘pacifist relic of the 1970s, in hock to the trade unions, with no grip on economic ...”

“... to be tested. Even before Allende had taken the oath of office in 1970, death squads paid for by Henry Kissinger had embarked on a campaign of murder and destabilisation, and had shot down the chief of the Chilean General Staff, René Schneider, in the street, for nothing more than his legalistic opposition to a coup. There was an initial revulsion at ...”

“... regime’, and come up with a variety of answers: it was conditioning, it was the repressive power of the clergy, it was guilt about sex, it was the fear of Hell. Let me put forward another reason, which was perhaps not given its due in How far can you go? Any intelligent, educated Catholic of that generation who had remained a practising Catholic ...”

“... in their dramatic context they often have the qualities at once of profound representational power and of equally profound self-consciousness that we have associated with the dynamic of that emotion. Few readers will fail to be impressed, too, by the sophistication of his analysis of what happens in the mind of the young Mamillius in The Winter’s ...”

“... on. The homicides and post-mortems in the book permit the new religion of science to exercise its power: but they also occasion the necrophile broodings which exude from Dyer. Much of this material – this archaic London, the Hawksmoor churches, their magical meaning, and the tramps who haunt them – comes from the striking poem Lud Heat by Iain ...”

“... ordinary films come to centre on her; even Vertigo, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, owes some of its power to Novak’s harrowing suspension between tranquillity and anxiety ... Vertigo contains a very subtle analysis of the ordeal and the self-obliteration in acting, and it works all the better because Novak was so direct, unschooled and slavelike. There are ...”

“... Beardsley spent far too much of his life in doctors’ waiting-rooms (in one of which he met Henry Harland, his co-editor at the Yellow Book), swallowing creosote pills, spitting up blood, undergoing capricious treatments, collapsing exhausted into bed, seeking relief in sea air and living in terror of dying abandoned abroad. Early in 1898, he died in ...”

“... first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He is equally familiar with the facial types and he renders ...”

“... Marxism. At the State Department Marcuse toiled to block the Punic-style plan of Churchill and Henry Morgenthau to agrarianise a vanquished Fatherland. The ‘de-Nazification’ programme finally implemented was an altogether more piecemeal affair than the Allied ultras had envisaged. Rudi Dutschke and the Baader-Meinhof gang arose from a Germany which ...”

“... were so often imagined: it was a modern manifestation of the Hydra of the Peloponnese, with the power to grow two heads where one had been. But a polype could also be a cancerous tumour; and the notion of the LCS as a cancerous, self-replicating, uncontrollable growth, whose numbers ‘exceed the powers of probable computation’, is everywhere in the ...”