“... enlarged figures in the right-hand foreground, including one who is practically all elbow, plus a little bit of umbrella; a rapid backwards plunge at the middle and far left, following the exaggeratedly sheer lines of Haussmannian architecture. The colouring is more striking, however, in its pale greys and blues, and with the shiny-wet cobbles, catching the ...”

“... was weak and prone to illness. Fred defended him, however, punching an Irishman who said that his little brother looked like a girl when he skated. Cheever opened his story ‘The National Pastime’: ‘To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.’ His uncle, when he saw him, said: ‘Well, I guess ...”

“... death: for example, in his 1987 back-to-the-Greeks book. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom called Dewey ‘a big baby’. Childishness – in the form of a lack of humility and a tendency to power-worship – continues to be the most frequent charge brought against post-Deweyan pragmatist philosophers. The whole tradition from Peirce to ...”

“... by the urge to build the maximum number of new homes than by the urge to make as much (or lose as little) money as possible.Pat Quinn was born into the final waning of the old East End, where working-class Londoners rented rooms in cramped, crowded, badly maintained terraced houses with poor plumbing and sanitation. Aged twenty, just married, Quinn and her ...”

“... Such lists can be dispiriting, and it could be said of this one that it had too little Shakespeare and no short poems at all (in such contexts, ‘great’ means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry ...”

“... Two, the French had rejected psychoanalysis as a German inspiration; after the war it fared only a little bit better with a new image as an American import. In the Sixties, all this seemed to change. A growing thirst for things psychoanalytic became a hallmark of French intellectual life. Ready to satisfy it was the brand of psychoanalytic thinking embodied in ...”

“... A patriarchal nimbus settled on Bellow in his later years that remains unique, inspiring, a little weird, a bit Holy Ghost. Attending Bellow’s readings at the 92nd Street Y was a form of religious observance. According to Atlas, ‘going to hear Bellow wasn’t a social event: it was an act of witness.’ Being on the receiving end of such reverence ...”

“... electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I used to take into Cambridge when I was doing National Service. These days, the populousness of the place apart, the big difference is not being able to wander at will, ‘The college is closed to visitors’ always on the gate. By luck we ...”

“... appeared sixth from the bottom of the list. Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the ...”

“... to write sections and passages that he then added to the manuscript, and by 21 January his brother Allan was informing Harpers that the manuscript already exceeded the length originally agreed to, possibly hoping, but in vain, that they would pay a bit more for it. No manuscript of the novel has been found, but it is estimated that the additions make up about ...”

“... at times indeed slightly unhinged. It may well make him rich and famous, in the manner of Allan Bloom, Samuel Huntingdon and other purveyors of the slightly unhinged academic diagnostic blockbuster. But the arguments he musters and the warnings he issues are curiously similar to those that have been coming out of one corner of the British Foreign ...”

“... that Armstrong was willing to be interviewed. Logan made similar assurances to the then DPP, Sir Allan Green. In July Anne Butler of the Crown Prosecution Service replied on behalf of Allan Green, saying that the CPS had discussed the matter with Brock and that she hoped there might still be an amicable solution. Logan ...”

“... a time when misogyny and assaults against women show no sign of diminishing, would they not be a little more cautious about sex? Grigoriadis’s book is full of stories of women students who look back on their willing participation in hook-up culture with regret, not least because of the dire sex. Or because it took them time to understand what had ...”