“... passing judgment on his characters with such solemn self-assurance, as from a Jacobean pulpit. It may be that the vengeful, conceited, ludicrous monologues of the appalling Croucher represent a form of self-parody. In our next three novels, all candidates for the bestseller list, the wacky, wonderful world of Washington DC and its heroic Press Corps is laid ...”

“... Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely ...”

“... language that is being forcibly altered to suit what is seen as a new form of knowledge. Hence we may be puzzled to hear of protagonists undergoing ‘textual breakdowns’ and ‘textual crises of identity’, often brought on by ‘transgressive semiotics’, a hazard normally, we are told, ‘gendered as female’. ‘The turning point from the imperial ...”

“... in the past). On historical precedent, Waterstone’s should win; but, like Barnes and Noble, it may lose the next battle. Smith’s and Waterstone’s are fighting a civil war, while the real enemy invades from cyberspace. Amazon.com began as a one-man operation in a garage three years ago. The garage-owning founder (now chief executive officer), Jeff (now ...”

“... a possible touch of self-pity. Verdi is at once exciting and safe. One reason why he seems safe may be that, after all, we don’t know him as well as we think. His life coincided with the high point of archive creation – after the establishment of reliable postal services and European peace; before the coming of telephones, small flats, and aeroplane ...”

“... between the Somme and Passchendaele, but Lawrence asked only that ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ Birkin enraged by ‘the disgrace of outspread London’ is not the same as his creator enraged by the disgrace of the Western Front. Lawrence’s point, of course, was that London and the Western Front were part of ...”

“... respectively. Pears’s own lecture courses at Oxford and UCLA (from which this book is drawn) may have followed this pattern, but he encourages continuity. He is not one to say, with Mr Bryan Magee in his recent BBC series The Great Philosophers,* that ‘since Wittgenstein repudiated his own early philosophy, and since in any case it is now his later ...”

“... editorial note tells us, solved the situation. Betjeman’s heart was thoroughly engaged; he may actually have suffered the sleepless nights he claims to have had. At all events we can be sure he would have lost more sleep over it than he did over the situation in Europe at the time. The same unsmiling fervour characterises a letter to Jack Beddington a ...”

“... writes, ‘are the same roots as those of the phenomenological school.’ The two traditions ‘may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow to different seas.’ The Rhine is Frege and the Danube Husserl, and the ...”

“... The prose here was wartime homesickness, commonplace as well as painful, but the poetry has what may now seem a slightly dated exactness and elegance, learned in part from Auden. Fuller was well known in the early Forties as a war poet, and there was a great demand for war poets. The experiences offered by the Navy were for the most part strictly ...”

“... a 12-year-old son and a sturdy little girl, also called Elizabeth, who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs ...”

“... there is almost no chance of your becoming a pathological fugueur. Our modern psychiatric bibles may still make room for the diagnosis of ‘dissociative fugue’, but there is no longer, in late 20th-century Europe, any ground on which that illness could truly thrive. A century ago it was different. Hacking is more precise (or peremptory): fugue, he ...”

“... Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may be ‘the world’s most famous painting’ but almost everything about it is obscure. We don’t know precisely when it was painted, we don’t know for certain who she is, and as we stare at her puzzling features for the umpteenth time we are inclined to ask ourselves: what is it about her? It is that question, in all its historical and cultural ramifications, which is addressed in Donald Sassoon’s elegant and comprehensive study of the Mona Lisa phenomenon ...”

“... like how thinking relates to talking and feeling. A second is that whether an animal can think may depend a lot on what it is trying to think about. Budiansky’s alertness to this point is perhaps what is best in his book. It seems increasingly clear that a lot of our intellectual capacity is, as one says these days, ‘modularised’; it recruits ...”

“... parades never seem to get rained on. Even literary critics, who will naturally feel flattered, may wonder what the value of this parallel creation might be to or in the world. Butler answered this question only later, by means of her most famous concept, ‘performativity’. According to this, to play self-consciously and theatrically with identity, as a ...”