“... the only reasons why the bandwagon of constitutional reform has been gathering pace. There is a more widespread feeling than for many decades that civil liberties are under threat, that our existing institutions are inadequate for protecting them and that our public political ceremonial bears less and less resemblance to the realities of the exercise of ...”

“... Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban America, and a participator in its ritual matings and partings, than if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex and family life. The moral ...”

“... would have suffered irreparably if everything elevated in it had not been mingled with its baser, more primitive elements. Bruno Schulz was not Dante. Nor was he another Kafka (a writer whom he greatly admired). No Thomas Aquinas stood behind Schulz’s infernos and glimpses of paradise; nor is there in his work any notion ...”

“... spirit in both these American poets, the collective spirit that Pound did so much to foster. More and more, he appears as the presiding genius not only of ‘Modernism’ but of modern American literary culture. In the aquarium with Jarrell, to be more precise at the ...”

“... turned ardent Thatcherite has produced, among other books, The Birth of the Modern (weighing in at more than a thousand pages), Modern Times, a massive chronicle of the 20th century, and lengthy histories of Christianity and Judaism. If succinctness is not his forte, neither is modesty. Johnson’s latest book opens with the claim that it ‘has new and often ...”

“... This attempt to embrace all living nature within a single system was an enormous task, more enormous by far than he conceived. Erroneously believing the tropics to be biologically rather uniform, Linnaeus thought that there were about six thousand animal species; the true number is more like ten million. He was ...”

“... to rediscover it. Liberty in the 17th century was thought to be enshrined in unwritten laws more ancient than the monarchy, and thus capable of being turned against regal arrogance. Charles I could do pretty much as he liked as long as he covered his back by invoking the national interest, a ruse that might strike Britons today as vaguely familiar. But ...”

“... and social democratic parties emerged to tame the excesses of private enterprise, the much rawer, more carelessly exploitative forms of capitalism found in the United States failed to provoke a political response of a similar character or on anything like the same scale. The paltry 6 per cent of the popular vote won in the 1912 election by Eugene Debs remains ...”

“... grips with the intellectual rigours of theoretical physics. J.B.S. Haldane hinted at the problem more cogently when he suggested that the universe might be not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose. Are we then up against questions that by their very magnitude become trivial? Horgan’s term for the activities of those who toil at ...”

“... behind him, not only the authority of Blake’s friends George Cumberland and John Linnell, but more recently that of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Nevertheless there is still, to my mind, a case to be made for transferral. In the first place, Blake was extremely secretive, and it is clear that no one except his immediate family actually saw him etching a relief ...”

“... people. Four Absentees portrays brilliantly George Orwell, Eric Gill, Middleton Murry and Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man is an acidly amusing account of his twenty-odd years as a radio producer, and the more directly autobiographical The Intellectual Part offers agreeably eccentric views about ...”

“... François Rigolot’s venture into Lacanian psychoanalysis. Yet even here the breaking of ranks is more apparent than real, since there is no regression to the attractive Montaigne of bygone scholarship, for Rigolot’s Montaigne is an oafish actor betrayed by his own script. Rigolot posits that the very existence of the Essais is pathological. Whereas ...”

“... And if death is culturally determined, it is also historically specific and thus altogether a more complicated matter than Hamlet allows. Certainly, the Renaissance ‘crisis’ about death, which is at the centre of Neill’s concern, is a quarry worthy of the spry, meticulous scholarship he brings to its pursuit. Webster wasn’t the only Early Modern ...”

“... and Britain looming, she suspected he had run off to join the militia. Eleven years later, and more than a thousand miles across the sea, a surveyor carrying out a study of the Icelandic coast for the Danish government was guided through the barren landscape by a man who worked in a local shop. The surveyor wrote in his journal that his guide was ‘very ...”

“... only for Liverpool Corporation and never, according to records, used outside Liverpool.Further-more, the livery of the bus shown in the photo is that used in Liverpool from 1947 to 1958. If the point was of any interest to me, he added, it could all be fully documented from Liverpool Corporation records.As far as I knew, Wittgenstein and Ben Richards were ...”