“... of in our house. My father liked to say: ‘I have no time for a man who cannot weep’ (he may have been quoting Churchill). At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my ...”

“... On​ 18 May 1961, towards the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to the Theresienstadt camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt ...”

“... doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at their adventures as a remedy for the ...”

“... all around her, which turn out to be protective angels.As astonishing as Margery’s experiences may be to the modern reader, she was following a familiar script. She knew about the experiences of other mystics, including the celebrity saint Bridget of Sweden, and her divine visions echoed theirs. She may even have been ...”

“... under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public opinion, provincial to the last, finally fell in behind its UK counterpart. What is most unexpected about the Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence ...”

“... because brashness is a necessary virtue there. He writes well, is extremely witty, and while he may or may not still be a Marxist, he certainly enjoys an opinionatedly radical cutting-edge quite sufficient to place him apart from the general run of American journalism. Moreover, he goads Americans by a scathing de haut en ...”

“... beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, ‘All these things will I give ...”

“... into its wealth leaves the field wide open for journalistic speculation. The British people may feel they have a ‘right to be informed’: but that right has been consistently disregarded, and the ‘authentic information’ has been deliberately withheld. Yet it is not only the lack of hard data about the extent of the royal fortune which is ...”

“... when he was in company and a deep one, a moi profond, for when he was alone, and writing. Letters may be written in solitude, but they are not written by the moi profond, whose arduous excavations of the unconscious and of buried memories are not to be squandered by being put into an envelope and delivered to a friend. It was vital that Proust the socialite ...”

“... illustrators and calligraphers, is set stumbling by the weight of its clothing. The aesthete may be charmed, but readers qua readers look only for puritan neatness. Billboards and headlines catch the eye, but if you want more than a few sentences to be read you had best turn to anaesthetic greyness and deny the eye its desire to find visual amusement in ...”

“... of such ‘cures’, though he does speculate briefly on the various drugs with which Woolf may have been sedated and the symptoms which they might in turn have produced. While he obviously deplores the handling of her case, the focus of Trombley’s outrage is not the treatment of Woolf’s madness but the diagnosis itself. Arguing that the doctors in ...”

“... with which, as the Elizabethan prohibition implies, it was often associated. Charlatanry it may have been, but like some other pseudo-sciences it bore solid credentials from antiquity. Pythagoras and Hippocrates had endorsed it as a formal study, and Physiognomonica, the treatise that was most instrumental in conveying ancient thought on the ...”

“... is now published here on another page. However, a biography which elicits that sort of response may always be doing so because it is particularly penetrating. I find this biography difficult to assess fairly because of the irritation it provokes both through its crass handling of the English language and through its snide attitude towards the supporting ...”

“... effort, a novel about a historian of the Nazis who is also a Nazi sympathiser – in 1995, Robert Kelly, in a somewhat grudging review in the New York Times, spoke honestly about the prompt reviewer’s quandary: ‘It is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds ...”

“... carefully – at every volume on the shelves. I ended up with three paperbacks: the Greek Myths by Robert Graves, Volumes I and II, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This is a commonplace book written by a woman at the tenth-century court of the Heian dynasty in Japan. I thought it was wonderful. I read it countless times. I was entranced by the beauty and ...”