“... commanders, he was allowed to assume the style of ‘viscount’, a title which belonged to his ward. In the English ranks, there were murmurs that Charles was overpromoted. But already his survival skills were evident. His very lack of political acumen, his absence of ambition, took him out of the front line of faction fighting. He was not subtle, so ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous plankton, and a ...”

“... it: it’s forceful, direct and straightforward in style, and depicts a woman in a psychiatric ward in conflict with her doctor, nurses and herself. Although she uses elements of detective stories and thrillers in her earlier novels, Quin is not interested in narrative for its own sake; indeed she delights in failing to supply the kind of closure such ...”

“... psychological principles, but his interest in the decision theories of the American psychologist Ward Edwards brought him into contact with Kahneman in 1969. According to Edwards the human mind was naturally Bayesian: it assessed probabilities more or less accurately according to a set of principles that allowed it to combine new information with existing ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from ...”

“... Beauchamp’s Career, Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Mann’s Magic Mountain and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, characters sit around and converse about – precisely – the issues which are exercising similar figures in the real world. Indeed, to debate issues is made their main activity, and the only reason the author has brought them into being. Here is the ...”

“... to which this reduced her. Lucia had enough to feel resentful about. Born in the pauper’s ward of a Trieste hospital, she grew up in an impecunious family which was continually shifting from one cramped rented room to another. They endured serial evictions, and Joyce often enough found himself without pen or ink. He was Mr Micawber without the ...”

“... experiences than ever before. ‘Since Christmas,’ Accidia wrote in 1955, ‘we calculate that John has spoken to over four hundred people – I to about four, and those would be the dustman, fishman, policeman and the woman from one of the Harewood Estate lodges.’ The life of the postwar married woman, diminished and degraded as it was, was whipped up ...”

“... had the social and intellectual distinctionof some famous Brigadiers from elsewhere: Julian Bell, John Cornford or André Malraux. But their motives for fighting were large – larger than Spain. As one old volunteer told Hochschild, ‘For us it wasn’t Franco … it was always Hitler.’ Before the populations of the democracies woke up to what was at ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”

“... honest and sober’ would win riches. He left the inevitable corollary to preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher: ‘If men have not enough it is from want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality. No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his sin.’ This moral economy nourishes a distinctive ...”

“... memorialist or seanchaidh, whose stories were edited into a book by the great Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell. Her words had gone on buzzing and irking in a corner of my brain. Most sources are agreed that the people left Pabbay and the last two islands in the chain, Mingulay and Berneray, quite freely, in a final despair at the harshness of the ...”