“... to be published in honour of the Goethe centenary in 1932. There are improbable moments in D.M. Thomas’s novel, but on the whole it shows tact and respect towards Freud. And The White Hotel isn’t only a case-history. Its heroine, Lisa Erdman, is more than the ‘Anna G.’ of Freud’s paper: she is also a ...”

“... unstoppable, and the war in Iraq was a brisk investment for the future. The US has many times more tanks, fighter jets, missiles and warships than any other country, but rag-tag armies of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan still defy its military authority. The American economy, which for years has depended on Asian willingness to finance US deficits, now ...”

“... by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on ...”

“... tells us that in later centuries, The Twelve Caesars (as Suetonius’ book was often called) did more than any other text to kindle interest in Roman emperors, especially after printed editions began to appear in 1470. Beard’s own Twelve Caesars is a book about the images of those rulers and about the idea of imperial power represented by ...”

“... the air of over-interpretation. All these turn up again in Hamlet in Purgatory, but altogether do more to enlighten than to confuse. Perhaps this is because the intellectual shell which enclosed Renaissance Self-Fashioning has dropped away: the faith in progressive authorities from Marx to Lacan and the Fathers of Past and Present; in the middle class as an ...”

“... as she announces at once she intends to do, Sybille Bedford starts her memoir in 1953, the middle, more or less, of her long life and of ‘our frightful century’ whose history is as much her subject as her own peculiar story. Her opening scene is a summer morning in Geneva, where she passed a few hours between trains, a woman in her early forties, ‘free ...”

“... a testament to ingenuity that it took so long to notice the seemingly obvious fact that legs are more powerful than arms when performing a rotational movement? Even after the invention of the pedal-driven two-wheeler in the mid-1860s, and the discovery that it was better not to pedal and steer the same wheel, the velocipede family was prone to odd ...”

“... natural, flowing landscape, one which, however artificially engineered, nevertheless looked much more like nature than did the parterres, allées and trimmed hedges of the 17th-century gardens they replaced. Brown was immensely successful. By the 1760s he was earning on average £6000 a year and he went on to stamp his ideal landscapes, including, as Jane ...”

“... visionary eye, / Soaring reflectively’ which he invokes in ‘The Fortress’ – though once more in the shadow of Platonic ideals realised on the other side of the Channel (‘the further shore’). His Journals of the time record how grand those ambitions were (‘One is impelled by a kind of pretentiousness so incredible that it simply has to be taken ...”

“... in David Thomson’s view, ‘one of the few major English directors’. That this status isn’t more generally acknowledged is partly because Jennings died only five years after the end of the war, at the age of 43, but mostly because, as Kevin Jackson says in this engaging, adulatory biography, he ‘spent most of his professional life not in the glamorous ...”

“... the other rocky planets of the solar system orbit today, there were once, five billion years ago, more than twenty worlds larger than the Moon, several perhaps as large as Mars. Collisions were common. Rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts tell us that one of these worlds, often known as Theia, hit the still-forming Earth, destroying ...”

“... Writer’s block must be thought of as a disease even more specific to a particular occupation than housemaid’s knee or weaver’s bottom. You can have those without being a housemaid or a weaver, but you can’t have writer’s block without being a writer, and a real writer, meaning one who is known at some stage to have written something of substance ...”

“... The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here given a more specific formulation in Hobbes’s distinction between locutionary and propositional truth. The second is a Romantic concept of revolution as creative upheaval. The third is a more recent notion of the exhaustion of ...”

“... of the day have been an inordinately long and dangerous journey; for Bloch it was surely no more demanding than the one that had taken him, on numberless youthful occasions, from his family home in the industrial port of Ludwigshafen to the old Palatinate capital of Mannheim on the opposite side of the Rhine. The fairgrounds and circuses and amusement ...”

“... through his eye sockets.’ Plus, the hoods we all thought were worn by executioners were more often worn by those about to be executed. Hooded prisoners were not only less likely to resist but less likely to elicit sympathy from their accusers or executioners. Rather surprisingly, given Kinney’s extraordinary range of reference – from online ...”