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“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... and impoverished, his house a ‘shack’, dark except for the gleaming cockroaches. As the poet David Constantine pointed out in a discussion with Berger, ‘for the bulk of the poem’ Césaire is ‘not celebrating his country, he’s saying what a shit, awful place it is’. He saw himself as facing up to the reality of his underdeveloped homeland from ...”

“... then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more ...”

“... to squeeze inside other households. Charities and social entrepreneurs want to help, but their means are limited. As is becoming more and more common across the British state, help is only available when you’re in the middle of a crisis, not when you can see it coming. As I write this, squeaky little derivative phrases like ‘the struggle against ...”

“... the horizon to guard against privateers and enemies. When they were within hailing distance (which means you could recognise a man you’d been sailing with for years, at least through a spyglass): ‘he who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the ...”

“... under-represented, the analysis of institutions in relation to culture. Granted that it is by no means possible to include every approach or outlook in a work of joint scholarship, the omission is still odd in the light of T.H. Aston‘s long service as editor of Past and Present, that French-inspired, Oxford-produced academic journal, featuring articles on ...”

“... of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling falling standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in ...”

“... Intelligence chief, Bill Williams, who on returning to Oxford became an éminence, by no means grise, in academic politics, Hinsley became a notable committee man at Cambridge and a natural leader of the bien pensants. As a young fogey he was quick to scotch intemperate proposals for change and to argue that a particular reform was dangerous either ...”

“... Freud​ died in 2011 and the amount of first-hand information available about his antics means that Feaver could easily have written a book filled to the brim with gambling sprees and babies, as well as egocentricity, carelessness, fecklessness and an interest in danger. And while he has indeed filled his book to the brim with the excitement and ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... a few minutes before he has to make the announcement, and the disarray of the judging process means that he can’t use either of his planned speeches but will have to improvise, cobbling them together somehow. This moment of public and media attention was exactly what he was looking forward to when he agreed to serve as chairman, and now it has turned ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... to throughout as ‘the Major’, a blinkered but liberal-minded Englishman of independent means made passive, bitter and melancholy by his experiences in the trenches. In 1919 he arrives at the Majestic as the fiancé of Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of the hotel’s widowed owner, Edward. The Major’s relationship with Angela is largely ...”

“... favour of reality. Impending death is a factor, of course, and cannot be denied. But Adorno, who means to defend the rights of the aesthetic, is preoccupied with the formal law of Beethoven’s final compositional mode, a peculiar amalgam of subjectivity and convention, evident in such devices as ‘decorative trill sequences, cadences and ...”

“... form. Nor does it take the form of the boredom with self either – that great peerless theme of David Foster Wallace’s in his last book, The Pale King (2011).Q. Does anything happen in these books?A. Yes, but not where you think. Let’s first follow a certain consequence of itemisation to its conclusion. There are feelings and emotions in these volumes ...”