“... who happily assembles constructions from a heterogeneous array of materials, and the more scientifically minded ‘ingénieur’, who is driven by the search for abstract concepts. The dividing line between bricolage and plagiarism is a fine one, and the case of Sterne – and of De Quincey and Coleridge after him – is still in many ways ...”

“... Australia, Peterley kept an extensive diary, rewriting the personal passages so as to produce a ‘more or less continuous autobiographical narrative’ which, we are told, the editor Richard Pennington further abbreviated for publication. The first four years of this diary are dissolved into Mr Pennington’s Introduction, and Peterley Harvest, ‘the private ...”

“... off my beat. Quite fortuitously, I reviewed A Mine of Serpents for the TLS myself, treating it more or less as a novel, which it was to only a very limited extent. There was some excuse for that, as a note at the beginning stated that the book was ‘complementary’ to The Military Orchid, rather than a ‘sequel’, and certain ostensibly fictional ...”

“... like myself finds their mid-1970s reinvention pretty impressive, and I’d like to have known more about how their new streamlined sound came together. Did the synth music they were making suggest pan-European themes? Or did they start with a grand Euro-vision and develop the soundtrack accordingly? To be fair, Kraftwerk have always tended to tell nil ...”

“... Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are ...”

“... it would be wrong to say that Germany has developed fantasies of continental domination or become more Eurosceptic – at least any more Eurosceptic than the rest of the EU. There is a new German ambivalence about Europe, but that’s because, after paying dearly for unification and suffering a decade of wage restraint and ...”

“... question is difficult to answer. The riches stored in the two previous dictionaries are now much more accessible, and reviewers have already reported how delightful it is to browse through one of the 20 handsome volumes of OED2, and ponder, marvel or cavil at individual words and definitions among the extraordinary wealth of examples recorded on its ...”

“... of the arts and liberal dispenser of gifts, who plunges into misanthropy when he can borrow no more and his friends reject him. The production was stylishly contemporary, set in the expensive interiors of Mayfair and Canary Wharf. During the interval, the audience spilled out onto the balconies overlooking the Thames audibly relieved that the play was so ...”

“... and deformed by its ideological battle with communism, to reincarnate itself as neoliberalism. More than one influential Western commentator in the 1990s and early 2000s outlined the new institutional framework within which latecomers to the modern world, without the benefits of slave ownership and colonialism, could achieve the virtues of individual ...”

“... moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness about the common people, which means that in the last resort their experience can be expressed by myth as well as by history.’ Yes, and the response of present-day common people to the Royal Family has to ...”

“... body lodged inside us, which invades our flesh like a lethal virus and yet, like the Almighty for Thomas Aquinas, is closer to us than we are to ourselves. This ‘Thing’, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls it, with horror movies archly in mind, is otherwise known as the Real, in the Lacanian Holy Trinity of the Real, the Imaginary and the ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... the disorders of the 15th century. So they did, in a way. Yet between 1509 and 1640 there were more than three hundred riots in England, many of them occasioned by the enclosure of common land or the denial of customary rights of pasture. Some were large enough to be dignified by the names ‘rising’ or ‘rebellion’, as was the case in the Midlands in ...”

“... Massillon, to whom the child explained the reasons for her ungodliness, he could find nothing more to say than ‘She is charming.’ Perhaps the roots of her later malaise, the melancholia for which she became well-known, were in the Pascalian ‘misère de l’homme sans Dieu’; but it seems unlikely. Her marriage was to a distant cousin, who quickly ...”

“... he gives of the Orwell industry are staggering. Early in 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four began to sell more than fifty thousand copies a day in the US, and in a Harris Poll 27 per cent of Americans claimed to have read it, though Rodden doubts the accuracy of the percentage. In Britain the sales during 1984 were 430,000, with Animal Farm not far behind. By the ...”