“... back, ‘Greetings from the famous son of a famous father,’ to which Dedalus responds: ‘Who may he be?’ Stephen, 46/41, walking along Sandy-mount Strand: Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. Gabler changes the stop to a comma, and adds: ‘a pocket of seaweed smouldered in sea-fire under a midden ...”

“... but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard littte shell of his own and out of ...”

“... seems, that certain subjects are inevitably more interesting than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than ...”

“... satisfactorily described. The consumption of all kinds of book is problematic. Purchased books may not be read; books which are read may be taken or mistaken in a multitude of ways. There is no ratings system which will tell us for books, as for television, what gratifies and what does not. All we have are the crude and ...”

“... already inspired. The consensus of Robin Hood studies as it has emerged in the past twenty years may be summarised as follows. First, as regards the legend: the earliest reference to ‘rymes of Robyn Hood’ is in the 1377 text of Langland’s Piers Plowman. By the early 15th century, references have become relatively abundant. The earliest extant Robin ...”

“... be a misrepresentation. Depending on which deconstructionist text one reads, deconstruction may be seen as a philosophical system, a critique of systems, an analysis of the conditions of system-making, a method, a critique of method, a mode of reading, a mode of literature in its own right, or as all or none of these things. Nor are the consequences of ...”

“... on which Mr Martin Gilbert is working for his great biography of Churchill. Mr Carlton’s work may therefore be ‘interim’ for other reasons than the Thirty Year Rule. Nevertheless this is undoubtedly an important book, the first major and serious biography of someone who will certainly go down to history as a major and serious statesman. It was too ...”

“... establish a very different relation between speaker and subject. At one level the use of his name may be taken as a straight-forward apostrophe or tribute, a ‘greeting addressed to him’. Such naming serves to summon up a presence which is sustained simply by the communal knowledge that Ponge is there. And there is a second kind of reference, also ...”

“... of work and the duties of the domestic life, or the impulses of the inner life. The competition may be a matter of man-hours or of values, or both: at any rate the division, once established, exposes the individual to stress. Wemmick in Great Expectations has expressed his siege mentality in his moated home, a refuge from the Jaggers law-work: ‘the office ...”

“... Yet, as has often been pointed out, the tone of this is equivocal: ‘incalculably diffusive’ may suggest an impressively far-reaching stretch for Dorothea’s influence, but it is a phrase instinct with doubt and the probability of that influence going largely unnoticed. ‘Unvisited tombs’ has a melancholy, even accusing ring when applied to the life ...”

“... recently begun to take at all seriously; and it possesses an immediacy which appears, though this may be a delusion, to allow, as he claims, ‘the voices of these peasants to reach us directly, without barriers’. Carlo Ginzburg is also a highly sensitive and imaginative historian whose prose style reproduces much of his mother Natalia’s clarity and ...”

“... Fascists. These were the clandestine product midnight hours, and according to SOE archives, which may or may not be accurate, we printed 1,200,000 leaflets between September 1940 and February 1941, when things went out of control; we undoubtedly printed a great many. Such was more or less how we began, a handful of us ...”

“... signify self-possession, and then use that knowledge, together with any other assumptions we may make about the man and about the circumstances of this particular gesture, as a basis for inferring what he means by it. Bremmer and Roodenburg’s contributors assume that communication is complete once signal has been decoded into message. In fact, it has ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... now is a public health service that is simultaneously starved, fragmented and centralised. That may seem a contradiction. Surely the point of centralising is to integrate. But this is not infrequently a perverse consequence of centrally imposed reforms: you can see the same effect in education and in the regulation of the City. To implement such reforms, a ...”