“... anecdote, and treating us every few lines to a wry aperçu or humorous sally or teasing aphorism. Geoffrey Braithwaite in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is the most famous example, but the voice that gives the lecture about Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) is almost identical; as is the narrator who speaks as ...”

“... die is the man that’s dead already.’ The two killers, Marvin and Clu Gulager, are by far the best thing in the film, scary, thoughtful and funny all at once, although you also have to admire the effect of what Geoffrey O’Brien calls Angie Dickinson’s ‘chic rapacity’. Otherwise the film is too slow and too ...”

“... be disabling, even if unkind critics carp that this is merely because Volvos don’t run on coal. Geoffrey Hawthorn (LRB, Vol. 6, No 17) seized on ‘the extraordinary fact about Thatcher’, that ‘no one is standing up to her,’ as affording ‘some reason, even if one is not a miner, and even if one accepts the most optimistic view of the supply of ...”

“... reputation than about his philosophical ideas. It therefore comes as a bit of a shock to read Geoffrey Warnock’s study. The impression here conveyed is that Austin was almost pathologically incapable of getting anything right. Time and again Warnock has to correct obvious mistakes, apologise for unclarities, expose ground-floor misconceptions. It is all ...”

“... to become a garden designer. Sally Festing convincingly argues that it was not as a second best to painting, as has been suggested, but on this point, as on many others, she otherwise seems to find ‘Gertrude’ (as she boldly calls her) inscrutable. Indeed her subject is often maddeningly uninformative. ‘To see Mr Ruskin,’ she writes in 1865, and ...”

“... retail was born, as a ‘separate business and major employer’. Manufacturing was a slave’s best chance of gaining freedom and social enhancement, never mind that most were rented out in gangs or that they were valued in sensitive economic sectors because they could be ‘kept honest through torture’. Best of ...”

“... was bisexual. Her affair with her teacher Ruth Benedict lasted for many years, as did that with Geoffrey Gorer. Without these two ‘intense liaisons’ it is unlikely that the bizarre research project known as the Study of Culture at a Distance and its successors would ever have got off the ground. Howard describes these enterprises with appropriate ...”

“... cyma reversa, or conjures light into stone through fluting and foliage. Interestingly enough, the best literature on this all-important topic – Sir William Chambers’s Architecture, for instance, or Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini – does not feature among Rykwert’s two thousand volumes, and even Ruskin (who, for all his impetuous dismissal of the ...”

“... John Sturrock’s little book is the best single guide to its subject that has yet appeared. Structuralism and Since demands, though, that its title be taken literally. It traces, technically and without concession to idle curiosity, the course of ‘structuralism’ in its modern phase – from the moment when it achieved new importance in the work of Lévi-Strauss in the early Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction ...”

“... I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s recent best-seller, Flaubert’s Parrot, quotes a letter from Flaubert to Feydeau: ‘When you write the biography of a friend you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.’ Sir Moses Finley has been my teacher, colleague and friend for close on twenty years, and while I am not intent on taking revenge on his behalf, I can’t claim to be able to write dispassionately about his work, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Ancient History: Evidence and Models, and of the republication in paperback (with additions) of Democracy Ancient and Modern and The Ancient Economy ...”

“... the Evening Standard Award or something similar at Bafta. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through ...”

“... the United States by the Constitution. This last citation is spurious.Some commentators, including Geoffrey Hartman, say that by the standards of the time this was pretty lukewarm anti-semitism. Jacques Derrida – a Jew and a close friend of de Man’s – finds it inexcusable, but demands that it be dealt with justly. He repeats that the article deeply ...”

“... Josef Smrcek and Frantisek Tomes, or about the specialised diet of the sheep that yielded the best 18th-century catgut? The oddest contribution – though also one of the most interesting – is Michael Spitzer’s analysis of the first movement of Symphony No. 46 in B and other pieces in terms of a theory of melody proposed by Eugene Narmour. The idea is ...”

“... isn’t necessarily ephemeral. Not all reviews are written lefthandedly by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more ...”