“... I Ching started life as a divination manual. Burn-marks in bones and tortoise-shells were read to determine an oracle, a broken line - - indicating (say) Yes and an unbroken line - No. Two further qualifying lines (Yes, but ..., No, but ..., and so on) appear to have been added to produce eight possible oracles, the ...”

“... the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his youth read many things he gutted the Columbia – the Cambridge libraries – Widener – Princeton – the British Museum – the Library of Congress but mostly he bought books to have as his own cunningly, like extra wings. he resorted to the Morgan for ...”

“... down – is in part responsible for his widespread neglect. Even so broad-minded and widely-read a philosopher as Arthur Danto has said that he finds Dewey’s work without interest, because lacking in ‘structure’. Ayer found (and, I imagine, Williams finds) in Dewey only a rubbery amorphous mass of neologisms (‘problematic ...”

“... with an Associated Press dispatch, not with the slow unfolding of generations. Nobody wants to read elaborate descriptions of things that might have happened, but didn’t, decades ago.’ The fact is that no prediction of the shape of the modern novel could have been more misleading than this one. Nor is it just a question of writers like Proust and ...”

“... he called ‘Man of the 20th Century’. This grandiose scheme provides one of the sources of Richard Powers’s first novel. The title, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, refers to a photograph of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like ...”

“... is past. In a few lucid pages on the ‘anthropology of ecological science’ that should be read in the funding councils, he explains the damage done by the short-termism of modern universities in search of ratings, prodded into mutual competition instead of collaboration, demanding that academics publish quick results in journals instead of making ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... life to lead and objects very much to critics who ignore that courteous distinction. In fact, as Richard Rand informs us in his Preface, Ponge was present at the colloquium in Cérisy-la-Salle where Derrida first delivered portions of his text. So we are not to expect any clumsy intrusions of unlicensed biographical fancy. In taking ‘Francis Ponge’ as ...”

“... so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra’. What else to expect from curators capable of insisting that the true home of modern art was St Ives or Yorkshire? ‘Pretending that it was is complacent, insular and either intellectually dishonest or genuinely stupid.’ How dishonest are ...”

“... A socially adverse public record is, on the whole, advantageous. The more felonious associates of Richard Nixon were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering ...”

“... Joyce left me worrying about two questions.* Did her subject warrant 526 pages? And was the great Richard Ellmann, along with other scholars, guilty of gross invasion of privacy when he published James Joyce’s coprophiliac letters to Nora? Both these questions are of personal significance for me. Last year I published 738 pages about Victor Gollancz and ...”

“... him ruining his eyesight, Tesla retreats to his bedroom and casts his own candles so that he can read in secret at night. He is brave and quick-thinking; when a fire-engine, drawing water from a nearby river, breaks down during a blaze, he realises that the hose must be kinked, and jumps in to clear it. Most important, he is a scientific visionary, an ...”

“... was conducting a homoerotic séance with the poet, could ever have been taken seriously, let alone read by generations of schoolchildren. As Jeffrey Kahan writes in Shakespiritualism, hostility to Knight ‘centres on his spiritualised writings and practices, which … academics deem … taboo’. In his essay on Knight, Michael Taylor quotes the critic on the ...”

“... sympathies are sufficiently wide and deep. If this is so, Baier’s essays are likely to be widely read by moral philosophers in the next hundred years. Anscombe, MacIntyre, Schneewind, Williams, and other contemporary philosophers have expressed well-founded suspicions about the value of moral philosophy as it has been practised in the English-speaking world ...”

“... a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in Fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read, Christopher Duggan fills the gap by examining a wide range of diaries, including Petacci’s, and the numerous letters sent to Mussolini by private citizens during the two decades of his rule, which often express the same intimate feelings towards the Duce ...”