“... at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit ...”

“... a teddy bear, that bridge inner and outer worlds, are held onto with corresponding intensity, and lay the basis for the infant’s encounters with culture. No one minds lending a friend an egg-whisk, but that’s my book, many people insidiously feel, when someone borrows a well-thumbed text (a text in which the reader has palpably invested their ...”

“... been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from ...”

“... doctrine could also be the product of a history that he did not control.’ She raises but cannot lay to rest illicit considerations – the suspicion that Freud was a purveyor of cures, rather than cure – because they open onto truths vital to psychoanalysis, rather than the truth about psychoanalysis. Hence the space given over to the assorted and ...”

“... to acknowledge that for virtually everyone actually involved in the events, the central interest lay elsewhere: in the fear of demonic possession. This fear is present from the very beginning, and it haunts all of Benedetta’s mystical experiences. No matter how alluring or convincing or ecstatic Benedetta’s mystical experiences appeared, it was always a ...”

“... or twee. The drawings are very much School of Stevie Smith, but even worse than hers, and the lay-out of the book brings to mind those reactionary underground magazines of the Sixties, where clutter and muddle were the major aesthetic aims. The title, Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded by] After, is the most verbose part of Anthony ...”

“... the expeditionary instinct that had Bryn and me angling our shoulders into the existential wind or Paul and me reconstituting ourselves around the thin spills of Old Holborn we smoked in liquorice papers, the sweetness offsetting the dark tobacco and the two together anchoring us after the night of non-being. They were dharma bums, mingling party life with a ...”

“... in the late 1960s, the Mexico City Metro remained futuristic enough to serve as the backdrop for Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version of Total Recall. Villoro says there is still fake blood splattered on the ceiling of Chabacano station. ‘City characters’ is one of the six themes Villoro uses to guide us through the megalopolis. Other strands address ...”

“... Chair; for when that informs me my Pound of Food is exhausted I conclude my self to be hungry, and lay in another with all Diligence. In my Days of Abstinence I lose a Pound and an half, and on solemn Fasts am two Pounds lighter than on other Days in the Year.’ Weighing yourself to assuage your fears was one thing; gambling on your weight or someone else’s ...”

“... elsewhere that in engineering terms it was not unfeasible, Pick seeks to uncover the history that lay behind this expedition. Malaria first and foremost. Surrounded by the swampy Campagna, crossed by a river which could slow to a near stagnant trickle or flood across the city devastating its antique sewage system, Rome bred mosquitoes of a variety that was ...”

“... the Jacobean Church as it would have seemed to contemporaries, who did not know that civil war lay round the corner. Collinson has done for early 17th-century religion what Conrad Russell has done for early 17th-century politics. He leaves the Church in the late 1620s where Russell has left Parliament – a very long way from revolution. The Jacobean ...”

“... business of the living They dug her up To teach her how to behave And to bury her better She lay there rosy-cheeked In her oaken coffin On one foot she was wearing A little red boot With splashes of fresh mud To the end of my life I’ll search For that other boot she lost As a translator of this poem, and of many others in the book, I naturally ...”

“... with the paper’s backers, and recent research seems to show him in no very creditable light. Paul Addison begins a commentary on Churchill’s career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of ...”

“... for their arcane habits of mind and their usually enraptured view of the mediocre and obscure. Paul Henry Lang – doyen of American musicology and the author of the magisterial Music in Western Civilisation – was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of ...”

“... keep falling back on restatements of whatever happens to be the current cliché. An example is Paul Dibb’s The Soviet Union: The Incomplete Super-Power, whose thesis is that the USSR is strong in military terms, but weak in all the other ingredients of power – economic, technological, ideological. As far as it goes, the book is rather well done, but it ...”