“... expect from the author of Plateforme (2001), and a less expected enthusiasm for the writings of William Morris – becomes the victim of an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist ...”

“... Perhaps. But the following things really happened. President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy ...”

“... wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working from a subtext of his own: Hazlitt’s crimes against ...”

“... for public attention, rather than acting as the spokesmen for inherently incompatible values. William Wordsworth, whose essays and prefaces originated much of the rhetoric of high-cultural debate, distinguishes between a taste for poetry – which involves active mental participation by the reader – and one for ‘rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or ...”

“... sovereignty and national dignity – why did they continue to ignore Iran? He was supported by a broad coalition of new Asian countries. Even the delegate from Taiwan, which had been given its seat in the UN at the expense of Mao’s People’s Republic of China, reminded the British that ‘the day has passed when the control of the Iranian oil industry can ...”

“... from European history conventionally understood. Instead, imperial history should be massively broad and always eclectic. It should involve national, European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course ...”

“... In the Thirties many of the abler philosophers of the previous generation, such as H.H. Price or William Kneale, in no way iconoclasts, felt grateful to Freddie. No one who has responded to the cadence of Freddie’s prose could doubt the expressiveness of his philosophy, or the vision of the world out of which he wrote. It was a world in which all ...”

“... hap hazardly, often without any discernible strategic purpose. Cabbage fields in the middle of broad valleys are surrounded by bunkers. Tiny hamlets on deserted mountainsides are defended by scores of solid concrete bunkers, while the people, unable to find cement and bricks, are trying to build shacks with quarry stones and mud. In Petrash, the villagers ...”

“... But equally suspect in the eyes of the new ‘critical’ regime, if not more so indeed, were broad surveys like the Pelican History of Art, those grand empiricist narratives dedicated to preserving the authority of the canon, and to parading a spectacular array of great masters and great masterpieces in a ‘pure’ space, cocooned from the ...”

“... hands and delicate features; Paolozzi is a little older, squat and square, with a pug nose, full broad mouth and strong pudgy hands. Together – the film’s title – they make a droll Beckettian pair (Waiting for Godot was in 1956 on everyone’s mind), but Mazzetti adds a twist: her heroes are deaf-mutes. We watch them communicating by signing and facial ...”

“... for Hume both as a philosopher and as a man. The obituary notice, in the form of a letter to William Strahan, which Smith allowed to be published, along with Hume’s few pages of autobiography ‘My Own Life’, in 1777, concluded with the words: ‘Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching ...”

“... for George Sand and her close friendship with the outspoken Anna Jameson, was an exceptionally broad-minded observer. In her eagerness to show the respectability of female marriages, Marcus perhaps doesn’t make enough of the tone of that liberal milieu, in which the unshockable ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’ would have been the norm. Henry ...”

“... of her own about interior decoration and dress reform. With her dark hair piled up under a broad-brimmed hat, high-waisted silk dress and velvet cloak, she looks in a photograph as if she is sitting for Klimt. The couple came to England in 1896, when Muthesius was given a post as technical attaché to the German Embassy with a brief to report back to ...”

“... political life. Is there a connection with the French Revolution?In responding to this question, William Sewell is attempting something quite different from a replay of past disputes. Although old enough to have participated in those disputes, he largely sidestepped them at the time. He made his reputation in 1980 with a brilliantly inventive book called ...”

“... of ‘three kinds of experience and inquiry’: visual, anthropological ‘or cultural in the broad sense’, and speculative. He is quite serious and also mildly mocking. These experiences matter, and mingle interestingly in the text. Calvino, one of the most inventive and thoughtful of writers, has been working (and playing) for years with the uses we ...”