“... John Sturrock’s little book is the best single guide to its subject that has yet appeared. Structuralism and Since demands, though, that its title be taken literally. It traces, technically and without concession to idle curiosity, the course of ‘structuralism’ in its modern phase – from the moment when it achieved new importance in the work of Lévi-Strauss in the early Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction ...”

“... to the assessments that claimants had to undergo in order to receive disability benefits. As John Pring shows in The Department, these changes – and others that followed – would ‘lead to countless deaths of disabled people’.Many governments have talked up the number and significance of false claims. A decade before the Blenheim conference, Peter ...”

“... by a new editor. De Quincey came to see that it was Edinburgh where he had to make his mark, with John Wilson, editor of Blackwood’s, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, and de Quincey’s contact and pal. (In his study of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, John Gross describes Wilson as ‘a pest’.) De ...”

“... and defended in the plainest prose. Lest that give the impression that Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer see themselves as Marxists first and philosophers second, it must at once be said that their work is remarkable for the unflinching way in which they throw out whatever won’t pass a dispassionate scrutiny. Elster’s Making sense of Marx has been ...”

“... in April 1984. His various drafts and notes have been ‘recovered and edited’ by his colleague, John Henry Jones. The result is often as maddeningly fragmentary as Faustus itself, and it is festooned with more footnotes than a redaction of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it has all the Empson hallmarks – the density of ideation, the abrasive wit, the marvellous ...”

“... of the 1970s – Ghost Rider, Luke Cage, Warlock, Iron Fist. His favourite comic-book artist was John Byrne.Karl got in trouble a lot. Luke didn’t.Though all three of us lived in rough parts of Brooklyn, Karl and I went to a terrifying public school in an impoverished neighbourhood, while Luke went to St Ann’s School, safe in moneyed Brooklyn ...”

“... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...”

“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... the numbers involved, a rank shift had occurred in certain hearts and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine ...”

“... by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going. Written around 1954, the poem got wide notice after ...”

“... for John Burnside You’d know her house by the drawn blinds – by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall, the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry. You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it from the sea and from the brief light of the sun, and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap ...”

“... of their properties, is so striking, that they appear to be only varieties of the same species. Dr John Hunter i This ghostly archive, lined with labelled jars is full of light. Each pickled thing bleached to ivory sleeps in a glass flask of formaldehyde, shelves of pale stars that catalogue our strange bodies’ history. I like the cuttles and the moray ...”

“... time, and point out streams He first saw on the road to boarding-school. And then he’d quote Sir John Davies’ despatch About his progress through there from Dungannon With Chichester in 1608: ‘The wild inhabitants wondered as much To see the King’s deputy, as Virgil’s ghosts Wondered to see Aeneas alive in Hell.’ They liked the feel of the valley ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... There’s a revealing slip near the start of John Banville’s new novel. Ursula Godley, whose husband lies dying upstairs, reflects on her son and daughter: ‘These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like.’ A phoenix can never feed its young because there is only ever one of it at a time ...”