“... Can those who oppose the death penalty escape cruelty? Nietzsche intimates that cruelty may well be primary. It can be repressed, which is a way of turning cruelty on oneself, or directed towards others in some moralised version, for example by preferring imprisonment to the death penalty (protracted cruelty, that is, over immediate death). The ...”

“... in the body or natural expression … in spite of high critical advice’. Above all, Collins may well have been transferring to another art form his own indignation that many considered the novel merely a form of popular entertainment rather than great literature. Collins’s aversion to connoisseurs and collectors found expression again four years later ...”

“... friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby ...”

“... efforts to purge the monarchy of the taint of libertinism left behind by Charles II’, and so he may well have designed the room ‘with this reformist agenda in mind’. That William would have found Venus ashamed less rather than more exciting than Venus asleep is questionable, but she was at least acknowledging that her behaviour did raise moral ...”

“... of the asylum claims considered there are rejected. The young man I spoke to believes – and he may well be right – that the high turnover ensures a profit for the private company that runs Harmondsworth. The company, United Kingdom Detention Services (UKDS), is a subsidiary of Sodexho. I asked under the Freedom of Information Act for the value of ...”

“... I’m low, I must confess, and need a prop     For a project sagging even as I speak. May I rehearse to you da capo (from the top)     The reasons why my outlook seems so bleak     In the herring-scented streets of Reykjavik? I have one precedent I can rely on: Your own impulsive Letter to Lord Byron. I can’t cast you as you cast suave ...”

“... succeeded thanks to his own vandalism and Forster’s loyal destructions and suppressions. We may speculate, but we will never know the inner Dickens which those burned papers would have revealed. The biographer must remain for ever fenced-off. Kaplan’s is an academic’s view of things. For him and his university-based colleagues biographies, like ...”

“... not readily imitable. Although Hoggart is now the only one of this trio still alive, many readers may have the vague impression that he has nothing left to say. The peak of his fame came in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and his later writing has never achieved the same impact. By publishing an autobiography, the last volume of which appeared when he was ...”

“... the crowded dailiness which so stubbornly resists the unthinkable thought that one’s whole life may be about to collapse into barbarism, torture and insanity. The Age of Wonders tells first of Austria in the Thirties and of a family which is in no way saved from anti-semitic horror by the plea that the paterfamilias (an intellectual, a writer, and a ...”

“... over my body too. The immobile is in a fixed, restful state, whereas ‘motion, however swift it may seem, tends essentially towards immobility, and thus, however slowly it may sometimes appear to do so, continually conducts bodies towards death.’ The Bathroom may sound offputtingly ...”

“... Street Mephistopheles: he stays the same whatever he writes. A Greene, though, or an Ian Fleming, may have to become what he writes, exemplify his own formula, with results that affect himself and others. Interestingly, unlike the cases of Shakespeare or Pushkin, the work of Greene or Fleming, and its appeal, comes increasingly to depend on the new literary ...”

“... individual and communal well-being. The evidentiary base began to expand enormously. Darwin may be seen as the beginning of a tradition – progressive and uncensorious – that construes sex as a natural phenomenon. Sir Patrick Geddes and J.A. Thomason’s popular volume, The Evolution of Sex, and Havelock Ellis’s massive Studies in the Psychology of ...”

“... of her achievement: ‘few writers of our time have been so organised for liberal, for – one may almost put it – heroic production.’ Even as James speculated on how ‘her remarkable life, and still more ... remarkable character’ might ‘lend itself to vivid portraiture’, he recognised how the very magnitude of her production would militate ...”

“... A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain. Eight years on – two years longer than it took to commission and publish the entire series ...”

“... The Mandy Rice-Davies response is unlikely to be sufficient in such a setting, and we may find ourselves close to where we started, with adversarial blood-lettings between hired experts – unless the goal of judge-managed litigation really is made the predominant one. The trouble is that judges are not trained to be managers. They are not even ...”