“... Gallimard sign of literary distinction. Simenon resented this, and his accession to the Pléiade may be seen as the belated recognition he coveted. Is his inclusion the consecration of the idea of a ‘popular’ classic in the age of ‘mass’ literature? This is the answer we might instinctively reach for, but it’s not the one with which the ...”

“... that they went on to discuss heatedly their rival pronunciations of Latin. That shared culture may actually be dead, and that story’s significance may live on only in the eye of sentiment, but I feel bound to carry on regardless, believing that Horace said, matchlessly, a lot of sane and valuable things. When Horace ...”

“... of Judgment says what is, in Carey’s words, ‘patently untrue’, namely that the beautiful may be so called only if the speaker believes that everybody else shares his opinion, and also that standards of beauty are absolute and universal. From the same unreliable source came the notion that art objects must be of no practical use, provoke no emotion ...”

“... you know that your faith, your assurance, are genuine and permanent; Calvin acknowledges that men may have temporary faith. But since the gift of faith comes before repentance it is no good looking inside yourself for signs that will justify assurance, or trying to verify your faith by good works. For Beza and Perkins, the problem is how a man can know that ...”

“... of the schools. It has even been suggested in the literature, that though a notion of necessity may have some sort of intuition behind it ... this notion [of a distinction between necessary and contingent properties] is just a doctrine made up by some bad philosopher, who (I guess) didn’t realise that there are several ways of referring to the same thing ...”

“... discreet about the beans, in the manner of a retired mandarin, and one suspects that where he may have been tempted to say a little more, the weevils of official secrecy have been at his manuscript. This is a pity, for although the subject is generally a grey one some of the characters – Brown, Castle, Wilson, Woodcock, Jones – had colour and some of ...”

“... fact, it becomes a central theme in a new form, the novel. That’s too glib, of course. The novel may have benefited from the dissociation of the notion of adultery from that of property, but there are other associations less easily dissolved. What about jealousy, an atavism no doubt, but still painful, and also having to do with the family, but not the ...”

“... Pritchett’s quietly extraordinary way of looking at life. Of course, the answer to this question may in the end not be very relevant or even interesting, assuming as it must do that an art of such freakish fragility is pierceable by criticism in the first place. Luckily, Pritchett the explicator is on hand with a new collection of essays to provide oblique ...”

“... out of oblivion.In Penelope Fitzgerald’s last novel, Offshore, the wide distribution of which may have had the fortuitous effect of sending up the price of de Morgan tiles, two rather forward little girls conspired to fish two out of Battersea Reach, when the tide was down and the afternoon sun level enough to cause them to glitter. They sold the ...”

“... Fontana Modern Mastership has by now become so diffuse that the editorial problem may well have shifted from choosing a master who deserves the accolade to finding a biographer to bestow it. Why else should Malinowski still be left off the list but Evans-Pritchard (E-P to all who knew him but not in this book), Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946-1970, gain the crown? But if E-P be held to deserve apotheosis then Mary Douglas seems, on the face of it, a very appropriate hagiographer, for she is a noted anthropologist in her own right, was once a pupil of E-P, and, like E-P himself in his later years, is an exceptionally devoted member of the Roman Catholic Church ...”

“... Forges), and with the iron and steel-making lineage of the de Wendels. In 1922, the granddaughter, May Bardoux, married Edmond Giscard, the President’s father. René Giscard, Edmond’s brother, married into another republican dynasty, the Carnot family. In 1922-23, the Conseil d’État rather grudgingly granted Edmond the right to add to his name that of ...”

“... of working-class housing, or on the conservative culture of the London working class. The author may feel that it is up to his readers to contextualise and evaluate this material, to provide their own framework within which to assess its novelty and significance: but he is surely the best qualified person to do this, and it is much to be regretted that he ...”

“... than three or four million years. As Greenwalt puts it, ‘protein sequences from really deep time may occasionally make it into the pages of the New York Times, but they do not appear in textbooks.’It may not be possible to ‘de-extinct’ whole organisms, but researchers have been able to resurrect individual proteins ...”

“... the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.This may not be the way the image has always worked in practice, however, given that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which dark night is the time of love, garish day the time of destructive violence. Juliet will soon be begging the fiery-footed steeds of the sun to ...”

“... response. To his ‘Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster,/As by thy words and works all men may conster,’ she shot back: ‘Hermaphrodite in sense, in art a monster,/As by your railing rhymes the world may conster.’ Scott-Baumann cites this exchange as proof that feminine rhyme was used when talking about gender ...”