“... and cultural process,’ perhaps forgetting that ‘birth’ does not merely mean parturition in English. Turning from the attitudes of the nobility in Paris to the misfortunes of Psyche in Apuleius’ fable, Scott adopts modern ideas as well as modern vocabulary. She claims that Psyche ‘did not overturn the dominion of male subjectivity ... but sought ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... might just wonder why Cavell doesn’t give up any wish to remain within the profession. But to Richard Rorty’s suggestion that if he finds professional philosophy so bankrupt, then he should give up his quarrel with it, Cavell remarks that one of his tasks is to ‘find philosophy’s loss of itself’. And this means to him that the professionalisation ...”

“... method of reading, which involves the testing of new hypotheses on texts – for example, that the English novel is best understood as an articulation of imperialist conciousness, or the hypothesis that every text undermines its own authority in the play of its figurative language. This mode of experimentalism produces routines and repetitious readings – we ...”

“... from some alien realm. I remembered something else she had said too: ‘I’ve always hated the English view of the novel … that there should be irony … distance … a very fine cool style, a very conservative way of writing a novel.’ I was glad when I found Diamanda Galas’s tribute on the Internet – ‘I once had a conversation with her late one ...”

“... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert was the ...”

“... and national cause in Hungary, Poland and Italy. The press presented the war as a defence of ‘English’ ideals – liberalism, constitutionalism and international law – against the Russian bear.There wasn’t much British postwar identification with the Crimea either. It never caught the imagination as a ‘lieu de mémoire’. In her excellent new ...”

“... of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls into a severe depression. He leaves a note on his desk saying ‘I AM SICK,’ and checks himself into a ‘rest home’. Relations with his psychologist are not easy: She took me to ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... politics of ‘lawful constitutions’ and ‘natural right’ – from the murderous madness of Richard III, you might say, to the enlightened benevolence of Nathan the Wise. Whatever might come of it in France, the French Revolution had ‘revealed in human nature … a capacity for improvement that no politician could have conjured up’ and, according to ...”

“... Glanvill, has an engraving of occult scenes, including the levitation of a Somerset boy called Richard Jones in 1657. This was the same phenomenon experienced by St Teresa but the English church no longer permitted Jones to be a saint and he was said to be bewitched. It’s significant that Glanvill’s work, one of the ...”

“... in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter in the House. The government had just announced that it would set up a committee to look into homosexual offences, and the trouble was that you couldn’t legislate for homosexuality, or preferably against it, without ...”

“... the motorist had been to blame, but in any case Grandpa was a hopeless witness because he spoke English badly with a strong foreign accent: I was told the judge had bullied him as if that was his fault, which doesn’t sound implausible. I was to hear about that again and again, especially whenever the subject of the law came up. The one thing I didn’t ...”

“... on the evening before the Commons debate. In the words of the independently minded Conservative Richard Shepherd, all we ‘knew about the Bill was what I believe the country will come to detest more than anything – the manipulation, the spin, the press releases and all the covert ways of trying to secure the legislation of this country without reference ...”

“... the ‘has to ... have to’? What necessity may be implied by the auxiliary power of that modest English verb? Other sentences come at us with a hyperbolic twist, yet strike home like a curveball right over the plate. ‘Not only does the critic say something that the work does not say, but he even says something that he himself does not mean to say. The ...”