“... self-humiliation; how it can pleasurably generate the very guilt it seeks to assuage; how it may be a way of provoking as well as avoiding punishment, or of vaunting the self in the act of abnegating it. There is also, if one recalls the young woman at Mass, confession as come-on. All this is alarming stuff for a society which believes that what you see ...”

“... this purpose. This steamy logbook was not published in its entirety until the late 1950s. To these may be added some passages in other published writings by Hazlitt, and some comments by well-informed bystanders, not least the outgoing Mrs Hazlitt, whose journal briskly records their divorce proceedings in Scotland. From these overlapping sources one can ...”

“... seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly attached to the prospect of nuclear war. The shift undoubtedly came in 1963 with the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which set in motion an intense public interrogation of Jewish conduct during the Nazi ...”

“... structure should, however, offer many points of entry to whatever sections of the Complete Edition may be made available to English readers during the coming years. Like the 1974 anthology, it begins with the ‘Philosophy of Music’ from Geist der Utopie, and ends with a corresponding excerpt from Das Prinzip Hoffnung; between, there is a shorter selection ...”

“... the kind that most of us have to live by. Not Canetti’s great masters, however. Shakespeare may not have wept over King Lear, may indeed have written the play in a passion of relish, but he suffered: the play is a correlative of his total capacity to suffer. That is perhaps self-evident and tautologous. In a climate ...”

“... this on the finale of the C major Quartet, Op. 54, No 2: ‘The work’s most shattering and, if I may so put it, untimely innovation is, of course, the adagio finale, which turns the typical symphonic structure with two allegros upside down, throwing up two adagios instead. History books credit the 19th century with the symphony’s slow final ...”

“... thoroughly at ease with perspective, as Haslam’s collection of his RIBA Drawings . He may even have modelled in plasticine. At the time of the 1981 exhibition, we had collected photographs of rather lumpy, hand-moulded models I then believed to be papier mâché or clay: they may well have been this other ...”

“... turned down von Ranke’s own vacated chair in Berlin. The fans of the lectures on Greek culture may have been dilettantes, but they were dilettantes of the highest order, including both Nietzsche and Freud. Indeed, Nietzsche’s flatteries became so extravagant – ‘that profoundest student of Greek culture now living’, ‘our great teacher’, ‘I ...”

“... However​ dissentious, alienating, confusing and anxious life may have been for most of the English under the Tudors, the period, especially its last two decades, has usually been remembered as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion ...”

“... He calls this physicality ‘spectacle’ and is conscious of its power: Pity and terror may be aroused by means of spectacle; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way … For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the ...”

“... Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than the borrowing may indicate; an accomplished book, marred by an over-abundant proffered delicacy of sentiment – ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ shining sweetly but with too constant a glow. Agee soon found a regular job writing for Fortune, where in the mid-1930s he ...”

“... become the target of unreasonable blame. The second, sometimes contingently related dream is what may be called the fantasy of the middle ground. This depends, logically as well as practically, on the model of a spectrum. The spatial metaphor exerts its own semantic pull, and so those placed at either extreme of the spectrum must be described as ...”

“... these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the destruction of basic civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and engaging in a wholesale attack on the premises of 20th-century constitutionalism. Or then ...”

“... you all about the colours and the fabrics of their clothes, and the shops they came from), and it may be unduly suggestive of the strictly feminine. Instead, let me quote Didion, from 1978, on someone’s ‘perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.’ Not that she was referring to her own ...”

“... of his having ‘arrived’. In daydream moments in between the usual author agonising, Podhoretz may have anticipated the publication of Making It as a climactic solo bringing down the curtain on act one of his career and a springboard for his next move. The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the ...”