“... who grew up hearing lectures about her father’s genius – given, of course, by Isou himself.The major psychotic breakdown came in May 1968. Isou couldn’t stop talking, sometimes in languages nobody could understand. The tumultuous events then happening in Paris merged in his mind with the war and the pogrom in Bucharest. The événements confirmed his ...”

“... beginning. Before his death, partly in response to attacks and criticism, Erasmus completed four major revisions, beginning almost as the work came off the press. His revisions contained replies to his critics, knowledge newly gained from further manuscript study, and, as his irrepressible desire to communicate with his readers took charge, his reflections ...”

“... young Robin was educated at home, where he showed remarkable precocity. His father, who was John Ruskin’s secretary, undertook the task of educating his son himself; Robin received from him a very wide and thorough education – in ancient and modern languages, history, science, music, art. In his Autobiography Collingwood reports having had a certain ...”

“... writing, to a remarkable lyricism about Glasgow and its light. Indeed, Glasgow is the other major character in the novel. Andy identifies the city with his lost father: his father who (like John Betjeman) pointed out that it is one of the finest stone-built cities in the world. As Andy reflects on his personal ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”

“... The proletariat inside Ulster, or rather the majority Protestant part of it, presented another major problem with which Connolly never came to terms. Here, Morgan reinforces the critical revisionist work of other Marxist scholars such as Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, particularly the latter’s Class Conflict and Sectarianism (1980). The basic defect in ...”

“... have a line there I wrote in Africa 15 years ago,’ a friend told him; others like John Davenport and Aiken merely kept score. And yet there is perhaps nothing in it as impressive as the first page and a half, a completely orderly progression of six paragraphs, massive and thrilling and utterly well-made, until the first line of dialogue takes ...”

“... character privileged to observe and reflect upon his surroundings. Apparently, this gives him a major advantage in the contest for the reader’s sympathies, to which must be added the considerable charm Storey grants to his personality: strong, silent, laconic, deadpan. Compared with others in the book, Attercliffe says little and does less. Most of the ...”

“... have guessed that of those two struggling young literary journalists, Thomas would become a major poet, and he himself the author of children’s tales loved by millions – nor that his liking for the verse of W.H. Davies, from which he quoted at length in Bohemia, was the portent of a shift in taste which would dominate middlebrow readers for ...”

“... no 17th-century vernacular poet of this name is now recorded.’ But this is of course John Ogilby, the dancing-master turned voluminous poet, whom Pope repeatedly gives us licence to call ‘great’ (‘Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great’ and ‘thy great fore-father, Ogilby’ in the Dunciad; Ogilby also ornaments MacFlecknoe). This ...”

“... has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be ...”

“... later restitution and final division. One might expect that all these variations would lead to major differences of demography. After all, Ladurie suggests, the custom of primogeniture (he remarks en passant how snobbish and affected of the English peasants it was to follow this) helped to make England a land of emigration. One would suppose that by ...”

“... and Facebook have trouble grasping the differences between people and machines. Apple is the only major technology company for which technology is a slave to taste. Over and over again, Jobs made large bets on his own ability to tell the market what it ought to want, and the market obeyed. This is part of what made Apple different: the wild innovations of ...”

“... Wiener presided, then a year at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study as an assistant to John von Neumann. A chance meeting with Robert Oppenheimer led to an invitation to talk about the Zipf-Mandelbrot law at the Institute. The talk fell flat, people fell asleep, and a distinguished historian of mathematics stood up and declared he hadn’t ...”

“... friend and mentor Millicent Garrett Fawcett – you wouldn’t know that its writer played a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause’. In February 1918, when the vote was finally granted to ...”