“... new form of writing will be necessary’ because the ‘swift’ scene changes on film were more effective than the ‘heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed’. In The Tenth Muse, Laura Marcus gives a lively account of the impact of moving images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th ...”

“... and publishers, by educationalists and cultural organisers; and one reflects how much cleaner and more decent it is to write for readers than for auditors. Patricia Beer might agree. But the moral she draws is different: how seldom in our time a writer gets a second chance. If you start off on the wrong foot, as she admits she did (‘I wrote as lushly and as ...”

“... Ectogenesis, and the eugenicist organisation that follows from it, stabilises society for ever: no more war; no more social struggle; no more progress. This, essentially, is the donnée of Brave New World. What made that book a bestseller, initially, was its frankness about sex (I can ...”

“... The British book trade is experiencing change more drastic than anything it has undergone since the 1890s. What is happening – something that can loosely be called deregulation – will undo the controls on free trade that were installed in the 1890s by the then newly-formed publishers’ and booksellers’ associations ...”

“... quite the right word – it is a kind of authenticity which is invoked here, as though water is more authentic, more real, wetter, drawn from an open-air cistern than from a city tap. The metaphysics of authenticity are a dangerous area. When Mrs Gray opines, ‘Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life ...”

“... several mysterious bouts of ill health. In 1843, he entered the Augustinian monastery of St Thomas at Brünn (now Brno). Obscure though it may be today, Brünn then was no intellectual backwater, and nor was the monastery monastic in the sense of any cloistered withdrawal. Under its liberal and intellectual abbot, F.C. Napp, it had become a major ...”

“... as the most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas Wyatt; but it has to be said that the competition for the top ranking south of the Scottish border is not very fierce, and until the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre. His poetry had come to be little regarded within fifty ...”

“... and the first change of partners in a frantic dance of infidelities, ménages à trois and other more complex triangulations among writers in London that lasted like an epic ‘excuse me’ throughout the Second World War. Bowen later remembered it as the ‘most interesting period of my life’. Lara Feigel unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the ...”

“... for whose empirical method Heinroth had considerable respect: William Perfect (1737-1809) and Thomas Arnold (1742-1816) particularly. (He, called William Perfect the ‘Nestor of English practitioners’.) Why then, the villainy? The answer is that, against the grain of the Enlightenment tradition which preceded him, Heinroth wished to restate, in a ...”

“... not least to do with hunting, which were at odds with France’s national legal code, and all the more fiercely protected for that. More controversial was the war cemetery with its rows of white and black crosses: white for those who had died fighting for France, black for the boys who had been taken off in lorries from ...”

“... account does not describe a Masonic network of power. What he finds are churches that seem more forlorn than powerful, and display hardly any sense of a unifying purpose. Almost everywhere outside Poland, the priests he meets have their backs to the wall. Not only does unbelief flourish, so do different forms of religious nationalism. Varied species of ...”

“... it. To be sure, his rejection of all forms of reductive materialism concerning the mind is much more circumspect than was Descartes’. Searle wants no part of any dualism of substances. Rather, he makes the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological activities of the brain. He calls this ‘Biological ...”

“... were there, among other reasons, to check the performance of a small jewelled watch, barely more than five inches in diameter, carried with them all the way from London. This timepiece, finished by the expert clockmaker Larcum Kendall at the end of 1769 after 30 months of painstaking work, promised a solution to the enduring puzzle of longitude, the way ...”

“... me round the ‘museum’ beneath the monument. On display, among ancient helmets and armour, were more modern uniforms, slashed or bullet-riddled, which had been worn by fallen Iraqi soldiers. It was Good Friday and I meditated upon the wounds of Christ. Some of the Arab poets with me lit up cigarettes, but the senior army officers present frowned. The ...”

“... over Eliot’s assertion, in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), that ‘the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’ But ‘the ...”