“... But Smith’s book is one of those pint pots that holds a quart, several quarts, and many prior conceptions should be changed by reading it. Her central objective is to represent late 18th-century theories of language and practices of writing in a political light. Her book develops the subject and historical method of ...”

“... being journalists. ‘Expert reporter’ was always a contradiction in terms. A certain amount of prior knowledge in technical areas won’t hurt, but the journalist who starts on a story believing they already know what it is cannot, by definition, be working on ‘news’. The confession of ignorance is always implicit: an event occurs, or the journalist ...”

“... Report of 1955 is cited for its ‘chilling’ prose. President Eisenhower had commissioned James Doolittle to evaluate CIA operations. His Report, as the Church Commission notes, can be read as a brief for future CIA operations. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at ...”

“... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we are just ...”

“... Calata devotes a significant part of My Father Died for This to his great-grandfather Canon James Calata, secretary general of the ANC from 1936 to 1949, who brought his politics to the pulpit and was central in making Cradock the politically conscious and active community for which it was still being punished in the early 1990s. Fort, ...”

“... of the sentences seem tackier than it would in a Chandler story. Somewhere in the background is James M. Cain, the author of the novel on which the film is based. And the actual writer here, the one who finally approved the words even if he didn’t compose them, is Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and co-author of the script. ‘He was a ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... Rex v. Edmonds and ensuing appeal (1820, 1821), and to several Chartist cases in 1848. Father James O’Coigly, a Catholic priest, was a United Irishman who, sometimes disguised as ‘Captain Jones’ was travelling in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was ...”

“... to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the ...”

“... remained faithful to those consciences. I have been claiming that figures like Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Proust and Wittgenstein illustrate what I called ‘freedom as the recognition of contingency’. Such freedom, I would now claim, is integral to the idea of a liberal society. In order to show how the charge of relativism looks against this ...”

“... to or falling back upon the established conventions of seriousness, be they the realism of James or the modernism of Joyce?That’s a problem for every generation. Ambitious young writers are always tempted to imitate those verified by authority; the influence of an established writer upon a beginning writer has almost entirely to do with the search ...”

“... comfortably into the world of the TV series Breaking Bad (celebrated in the LRB of 3 January by James Meek). Dorn, forty years ahead of the game, exploited that clarity of light, where bad things have a hyper-real outline and the borders between countries and states of consciousness are dangerously porous. As a former high school quarter-miler, he was alert ...”

“... Wordsworth, Johnston suggested, had been sent to Hamburg to warn the British minister there, Sir James Craufurd, of De Leutre’s activities. Much circumstantial detail was recruited to support this speculation. The story reached the newspapers and Wordsworthians could only answer that they felt in their bones that this was all very unlikely. In a ...”

“... the codex freed the reader to write. The ‘book’ in the sense of folded pages, then, is both prior to and distinguishable from print: inaccuracy meets tautology in Finkelstein and McCleery’s claim that ‘since the invention of the printing press, books and print culture have been central to the shaping of culture.’ At the same time, the Reader’s ...”

“... Balzac and others, until the silly enterprise was laughed out of existence. To read, without prior permission, a ‘first-class’ author entailed excommunication. Or so they said. But French Catholics never stopped reading Rabelais. Only Protestants or Anglicans could print him openly. Protestants dropped his attacks on Calvin or turned them into ...”