“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the ...”

“... his fiction is that ‘the personal element is there’ – an understatement that ranks with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than ...”

“... sessions alone with great pictures acknowledges that access to all this ‘intentional activity’ may be hard: but not because the artists belong to different periods and countries. Psychoanalysis encourages the idea of an unchanging basic structure of the human mind. ‘Beliefs’ and ‘commitments’ have changed greatly, however, and if one admits their ...”

“... the biographer is left in both cases with an achievement that is certainly impressive, but which may seem too vicarious to justify a great deal of attention. It included remarkable services to the fiction of Dickens and George Eliot, but also decades of much more routine editing and reviewing for the periodicals. Finally, the personal impressions of Lewes ...”

“... awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying the critical principles which Ricks enunciated in a recent consideration of Empson’s work. Ricks praised his critical master in this journal for speaking ‘with the direct personal commitment that, prior to the current ...”

“... will seem little more than an apology for sensationalism. If pattern predominates, the characters may decline into automata. The author is likely to have his work cut out to sustain a level of psychological and emotional realism adequate to his proposed action. Even if he strikes the right balance in each separate episode, the total effect ...”

“... you ask yourself why he did not shoot himself, or rather begin to wonder, nervously, whether he may not try to. The laments about a writer’s life, which are the dominating theme of his letters, are quite agonising. To Cunninghame Graham he writes, 16 February 1898: ‘Cher ami, I did not write because I was beastly seedy – nerve trouble – a taste of ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... to be an outsider, as not sharing a common identity. Thrown into the company of strangers we may turn inward, out of fear, or indifference, or the belief that only in that way shall we find our ‘true’ selves; or we may turn outward, anticipating interactions that offer neither a sense of wholeness nor comfort in ...”

“... governments: so far even the rich haven’t been able to buy their way out of a traffic jam. This may change – we might yet see bus lanes redesignated as toll lanes. The contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one ...”

“... across in very similar fashion in the other translations I’ve looked at (those of Ann Dunnigan, David Magarshack and Natalie Duddington), offers a fine example of sly and compassionate satire, a very rare genre indeed: In walked a man of indeterminate age and indeterminate physiognomy, at that time of life when it can be difficult to guess a man’s ...”

“... we can imagine them holding their conversational own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they ...”

“... them from talking about ‘the moral landscape’, fMRI studies aren’t taken very seriously. As David Eagleman writes in his recent book Incognito, ‘imaging methods make use of highly processed blood-flow signals, which cover tens of cubic millimetres of brain tissue. In a single cubic millimetre of brain tissue, there are some one hundred million ...”

“... man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was much more to this king than prowess in arms. The book, which Vale says is ‘not a biography’, has three broad aims. The first is to move ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”