“... much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger project. Robert Nozick is cited (twice) as producing the elegant suggestion that we don’t have to choose between presence and absence, or between Heidegger’s Seiendes and Nichts, since we could have ...”

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare ...”

“... Penrose had brought from Venice. Afterwards he sat in a room alone, weeping. ‘Whatever humour may dominate,’ Penrose writes, ‘there is always instability in P.’s mood. While in the happiest of moods, for some imperceptible reason a shadow falls across his face. It becomes pale, ridden with care and his eyes blacken like two nails driving deep into ...”

“... there would have been too upsetting.’In The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (1989), Robert Wistrich argues that for Roth ‘the world of the shtetl re-emerged as the ideal embodiment of a lost intimacy and innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s ...”

“... different from an ‘Atlantis’ reconstructed on a Bahamian beach or the fake ruins of Hubert Robert, both of which she gives as examples of kitsch, just because one is real, the others fake, one melancholic, the others nostalgic? Both categories of object seem to me to trade on the viewer’s engrained sentiments and predictable responses. In this ...”

“... and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a good deal of ...”

“... he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off he was in such a state.’ When Freud was in hospital ...”

“... less sympathetically on his compulsive rituals, facial tics, and the strange noises he made, which may have been symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. In later life, Johnson told a friend that he had never tried to make a good impression on anyone until after the age of thirty, ‘considering the matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background ...”

“... about anything, asking questions like ‘what was the First World War all about?’, but this may have been a game. He was the first member of his family to go to college. Normally, in the words of a neighbour, ‘you graduated from high school and you went to the mill.’ Warhol went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study art. He ...”

“... range of reference, forcefully written and fairly eccentric, 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... warning: his history of metaphysics is not what you get in books on the history of philosophy. It may not be until page 379 that the penny will drop, for there Rée seems to say in passing that metaphysics consists of ‘the more or less unconscious myths, maxims and metaphors we live by’, Oh. One of the pleasures of the book is that its topics are made ...”

“... objects of moral concern. We see also, reading between the lines, the birth of a cruder idea which may be described as the Mediterranean macho paradigm, the notion that virility depends on being on top and that the gender or even species of what is underneath is immaterial. This alternative view of sexuality, a folk view still extant and not limited to the ...”

“... To worry in this way, you need to take seriously the question whether our descriptions of Reality may not be all too human, all too influenced by our hopes and fears. It helps to anguish about whether Reality (and therefore Truth as well) may not stand aloof, beyond the reach of the sentences in which we formulate our ...”

“... for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along.’ The definition is as follows: ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of ...”