“... room he had an absent look, staring into space and not uttering a word. Twelve years earlier, in May 1909, Bronia Nijinska had watched her brother wow the audiences of Paris, dancing the role of Armida’s favourite slave in Le Pavillon d’Armide during the first season of the Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev: ‘While he is still up in the air a rumble ...”

“... be confined to university departments of literature. This desire to ‘keep philosophy pure’ (in Richard Rorty’s phrase) has more to do with professional self-esteem than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of ...”

“... of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although ...”

“... of the age imposed a precise geometric order on the pastoral scene.’ New as the geometric order may be, chasing after hares is as old as any ancient rite, but who or what is hunting the hare in Turner’s painting? Is it just a train, and how familiar, really, is that location? You can shut down the iconographical interpretation of art, with its artistic ...”

“... a ball into a net. What is a ‘fair’ advantage? Being confident and being able to speak clearly may be helpful qualifications for a barrister who has to lead in a crowded court, but we have to ask where these capacities come from, who is likely to have them, and so on. These are all familiar arguments, or at least they were. I’m rehearsing them here only ...”

“... been rising out of my past to express surprise that I ever should have amounted to anything. You may not believe it but I am going to have to thank one fellow for remembering the days of ’81 when we went to kindergarten together and once cut up a snake into very small pieces to see if contrary to the known laws of nature we couldn’t make it stop ...”

“... mountains of glossy Australiana now on offer – the bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are ...”

“... depends on a successful resolution of two sets of questions. The first seems to be formulated by Richard Titmuss in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Titmuss draws a distinction between Britain, where all fresh blood donation was voluntary, a gift to the community and hence an expression of concern with the general good; and the ...”

“... lecture, that ‘it is valuable to understand the poetry of the 17th century, in order that we may understand that of our own time and understand ourselves’ was one for which, in 1926, there was a fit audience, even though few. But how to go about understanding it in just this way – that is, with a view to understanding ourselves (scil. the mess we’d ...”

“... in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after all, this lofty, cold, smug, politically neutral figure is himself a kind of one-man Switzerland. The trouble with this image ...”

“... relegation of the topic to the relatively safe domain of metaphor is part of a tendency which may be seen in other writers, whether or not for similar reasons. Freudian discussions, so far as I know, do not normally raise the question of whether the use of cannibal metaphors might be implicated in a deep cultural reticence about the literal deed. In ...”

“... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...”

“... mortally ill. He never saw their publication, nor were they published in Russia: he sent them to Richard Gregory in England. They will appear in Gregory’s Oxford Companion to the Mind. Inner difficulties and outer difficulties match each other here. It is not only difficult, it is impossible for patients with certain right-hemisphere syndromes to know ...”

“... of this book so that you could not read it. But now you can. Or at the very least, now you may. I telephoned the publicity department of HarperCollins to inquire who had tried, and how, to ‘stop the publication’ of Newt’s fruits. There was vagueness. I was referred downwards and sideways and eventually into the post-voicemail void. Now, there was ...”

“... much as in the vividness of his most striking imagery.’ ‘The requisite degree of incipience’ may, like other critical formulations of Leavis’s, have an oddly bureaucratic sound, but it is an accurate description of a power that Shakespeare developed, occasionally almost over-developed, in the plays after Hamlet. Any admirer could multiply ...”