“... world remained enchanted. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic is still a delight to read, but the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ has only become harder to sustain in the fifty years since it was published. Indeed, the book did much to define popular religion as a richly diverse scatter of customs and practices, and to explain ...”

“... of Buckley provoked discontent in right-wing reviewers (once they had given it a ‘Washington read’ and searched for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent offensive looked somewhat different when viewed at longer range. The same Buckley who swooned over McCarthy was ...”

“... in psychological terms and a feat of artistic integration. Roth was ‘furious’ when he read the article. How furious? He ‘thought of ending the analysis entirely’. In other words, nothing changed. That’s not normally the way fury takes Philip Roth. It seems likely that Kleinschmidt, even in the offending article, was giving Roth general ...”

“... of the experiment in tripartite government is relentlessly laid out. It is not an easy read, but two aspects of it are especially striking all this time later. One is the sense of an age that has utterly passed. For those who lived through it, there’s a grisly horror in being forced to remember a long-gone mantra like ‘Stage Three of the ...”

“... Two days before making this statement the President awarded the National Security medal to Richard Helms, the former CIA Director who had been fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended jail sentence for lying to Congress.4 Casey himself has been awarded the CIA’s highest medal for bringing ‘imagination to our operation’.5 Reagan’s open ...”

“... an interpretation rather than a given. (The best description of this theme in modern thought is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) Derrida, in criticising ‘presence’ and ‘Western Metaphysics’, is, along with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sellars and Quine, criticising the ‘myth of the given’ – the myth that knowledge can be ...”

“... and Goldman appears to mean it, at the time. But it is not what he turns out to mean. One needs to read no further than twenty pages into the book to realise that Goldman’s true feelings involve a rearrangement of his terms. What he really means is that ‘mass culture’s deep atavistic longing for royalty has betrayed American democracy.’ This it has ...”

“... Howe has shown that he has the courage of Mr Healey’s convictions.’ Personally, I do not read British economic policy since the war as having been quite as single-mindedly obtuse as Pollard maintains. The weaknesses have been wider and deeper. Rather than continuity, Thatcherism represents a perverse reaction to a misreading of those weaknesses, all ...”

“... The answer is that it is an inept rendering of the sexual term jouissance in the translation by Richard Miller in which Anglophone readers regularly misread Barthes’s Plaisir du Texte, though it’s true that no single English word gives the full sense of ‘active pleasure’, with specific associations of orgasm, of Barthes’s usage. Barthes isn’t ...”

“... lushly ‘pagan’ and pastoral. Still, Reid is as much a part of the ‘Arcadian’ tradition as Richard Jeffries, author of Bevis, who does get in. Carpenter’s claims for the authors under consideraton, perhaps, are not always justified. However, his critical manner is in many respects exemplary: sharp, resourceful, diverting and illuminating. Dryness and ...”

“... from his mind?’ The point is not that Dodsworth does not have a coherent argument. When read more than once, the structure of his case reveals itself more clearly: connections between bodies, dead bodies and bodies soon to die; subtle routes by which the practice of honourable conduct is lost and then, degenerate but still noble, is represented and ...”

“... the reader often has the opportunity of checking both their facts and their hypotheses. They have read widely and sometimes critically, and they even assure us that they have reached some of their more sensational conclusions with reluctance. The field they cover is vast, and there is one drawback of a work of historical detection on this scale from which ...”

“... death thirty years later. Some of these letters, edited (and in Gide’s case translated) by Richard Tedeschi, appeared in a recent edition of Salmagundi. Dorothy Strachey’s letters are strikingly similar to Olivia in language and attitudes: they show someone working, often on rather exiguous materials, to create a hero and, in doing so, a place for ...”

“... checklist of French pop performers: Sylvie Vartan (‘a tarty-looking piece’), Johnnie Halliday, Richard Anthony. Alien noises ‘coming out of my daughter’s battery-operated Dansette record-player’. These temporal prompts, supposed to shift us back into period, are obtrusive. The quality of the writing makes its own time, all times, the present of the ...”

“... in this volume of essays on his work. But in any case, Hall’s chameleon-like career can be read just as plausibly in terms of consistency as of fashionability. Where he is now, proclaiming the virtues of a pluralist politics which thrusts culture to the fore, is pretty much where he kicked off in the days of the old New Left. It is not so much that he ...”