“... to psychoanalytic theory, but does not hesitate to declare its shortcomings. The Dreaming Brain may be seen as an attempt, generally successful, to supplant the analysis of dreams that lies at the core of psychoanalytic theory with a radically different neurophysiological vision, a central challenge to the scientific and psychological foundations of the ...”

“... verse is alive to the selfishness of how we suffer but vaunt at the same time, and that these may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and ...”

“... In the present climate of polemical exchange one may doubt whether Gabriel Josipovici would take very kindly to being enlisted on the side of ‘literary theory’. Though his essays make reference to figures like Barthes and Derrida, they do so with an air of studied detachment, as if to forestall any charge of deeper complicity ...”

“... May 1915 saw the end of the last purely Liberal government in Britain. October 1964 saw the defeat of the last aristocrat to head a Conservative government by a Labour Party dedicated to regenerating the country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen ...”

“... but not made light of – such as the suggestion that Ricks’s enthusiasm for Little Gidding may be misplaced. It was Ricks’s defence of what he had called ‘the generous common humanity’ of the clichés in Little Gidding that Hill took particular objection to. ‘I would ask him,’ Hill riposted with some sting in Style and Faith, ‘to place his ...”

“... The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 April, with the run-offs on 6 May – has moved matters along at a quicker pace than even ACLEFEU optimists could have hoped. The electoral register for the presidential elections, and for the elections to the National Assembly in June, closed at the end of last year. Since then the ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... be dead within months. He took the risk and arrived at Wilhelm Stekel’s clinic in Vienna in May 1927. Stekel practised what he called the ‘active-analytic’ method, and made much shorter work of psychoanalysis than the Freudians did. As Delany explains, he didn’t ‘sit around while his patients slowly uncovered their subconscious fantasy ...”

“... Betjeman. Larkin, of course, is the one contemporary to whom Amis is prepared to yield high marks (Robert Conquest, perhaps the most ‘all right’ of Kingsley’s literary cronies, is shunted off into ‘light verse’). Larkin is named as Amis’s second-favourite poet (Housman is tops, though he may not have stayed ...”

“... more carnivalesque mood) in connection with ’68, whose beginnings he describes: not in May but in February, with the demonstration over Malraux’s sacking of Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque. (‘The battles with riot police were spiced with the saucy presence of Marlene Dietrich.’) However congenial and informative these two ...”

“... signalled his intentions to his far-flung sublunar creatures. No need for poets then to ask, with Robert Frost, whether design governed in so small a thing as a royal bastard’s rebellion or a reflagged Kuwaiti oil ship. In fact, neither Lilly nor Ashmole would have needed to wonder whether such seemingly minor events might escalate into large and then ...”

“... greatest hits from recent historical writing are converted into Post-Modernists – Simon Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis and Orlando Figes. But Evans never cites an instance of these authors even borrowing the Post-Modernist label, let alone one showing that they conceive of themselves as working on behalf of an intellectual cause known as ...”

“... of a thing with itself is shown its original doubling.’ The ‘original doubling’ of what? May Wittgenstein be saved from such clarification! Too often Brand reads Wittgenstein exactly backwards. For example, Brand says: ‘One cannot speak without thinking and one cannot think without speaking. If I think, I am speaking internally.’ He cites ...”

“... learning, judgment, wit and literary sophistication with which Manuel builds up his case. But it may suggest reasons for thinking this much the most stimulating book on Newton and his science which we have. Manuel makes it abundantly clear that he is not ‘explaining’ Newton’s genius, but only the outward forms in which this genius was expressed. Work ...”

“... cheeks in the hope that he might open his eyes for a moment and say hello or goodbye’ – about Robert Graves in Majorca, and about an old lady singing: Forty-four and forty-five Am I dead or am 1 alive? I know but I don’t care. I know about despair. This intensely personal structure of image and reference ensures that Blackburn is always present in her ...”