“... perhaps the circumstances in which she wrote it seemed, after the war, too distant; and it may be that it was too closely attached to her private feelings anyway. As many of her critics remark, Barbara Pym’s fiction characteristically takes off from some autobiographical reality: the unexpectedly high incidence of anthropologists, for instance, is to ...”

“... post-war foreign policy ‘establishment’: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy and Averell Harriman. All were men whose influence derived less from their official station than from their social position, their professional and intellectual accomplishments, their personal prestige and their friendship with one ...”

“... But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan. We see him sitting by the camera on the set of Rear Window, looking ...”

“... file, and some forty thousand of them died. Their sufferings were not mythical: nonetheless, one may question the way their particular sacrifice came to dominate the nation’s collective memory of the war (the memories of France and Germany were quite differently constituted). Still very much an insular nation, Britain could not easily comprehend the extent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... that their spouses will be in the grip of a powerful obsession which they cannot share and which may drive these spouses to their laboratories even on Christmas morning. The passage reminded me of Odile Crick’s complaints about her husband’s prolonged periods of in explicable broodiness. On the question of racism, Medawar reflects on the remarkable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I haven’t found anybody interesting yet. There are not many young people and the small ‘Robert’ (who calls himself ‘Wob’) doesn’t mind accepting a box of bricks (bought at the barber’s) from me but he doesn’t want me to help to play with ’em. I tried yesterday. ‘Wob’ stood it as long as he could. Then he screwed up his face, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... homo: the concept is rejected both by heterosexuals (unwilling to accept the possibility that they may not be as straight as they think they are) and by homosexuals (outraged by the easy option offered to make them straighter). The very term is semantically ambiguous, vacillating between the original botanical meaning – ‘of two sexes’ or ‘having both ...”

“... through the pretence of utter indifference to any other possibility. As a gimmick the Modern may fire an arrow backward, but must always shun the convention of consciousness running free in time – being ondulant et divers. This is as true now as it was in the days when the Modern was invented, and practised by novelists like Hemingway or Anthony ...”

“... 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 ...”