“... Shakespeare & Company: One evening a crowd gathered in Sylvia’s bookshop to hear T.S. Eliot read some of his own poems. Joyce sat near Eliot, his eyes concealed under his dark glasses, silent, motionless, head bowed a little, eyes closed most of the time, as I could plainly see from my chair a few feet away in the same row, as far removed from human ...”

“... not stand for laissez-faire liberalism and the banishment of the state from the marketplace? Donald Winch’s major revisionist interpretation in Adam Smith’s Politics (1978) accurately mapped Smith’s intellectual project, and the important, but far from all-encompassing, role played by political economy within his scheme of statecraft. Winch, an ...”

“... converted the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Six members of the group – among them, its leader, Donald DeFreeze – died in a Los Angeles police shoot-out in May 1974, and a further three (including Hearst) were arrested 14 months later. Escaping arrest, Soliah had gone underground, changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and built a new life for herself as the ...”

“... to think whether the Arab Spring might undermine the need for jihad. A couple of pages later, we read what seem likely to be the thoughts of Mariam, who probably transcribed the document, on the ‘new vision’ of al-Qaida that her father was planning to announce on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.Bin Laden had four wives: Najwa, Khairiah, Siham ...”

“... She is propositioned for sex by randy Europeans and responds to the indignation of a woman who has read in the newspaper that one in eight young people has never seen a cow in real life.The first part of the novel becomes a satire of white guilt as it’s performed and experienced online. ‘White people,’ she observes, ‘were suddenly feeling compelled to ...”

“... intimacy that was sometimes called “the American way of life”’. This was in 1997, when Donald Trump was divorcing Marla Marples. It would be a mistake to think that feelings are flimsy, ephemeral things; for Berlant, structures of feeling guaranteed the durability of conservative cultural politics.In the final book of the trilogy, The Female ...”

“... really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read ... I planned a longish poem, about 750 lines, which I finished about a month ago and have just revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at ...”

“... up with them, but the memory of what it is like to do philosophy or geology remains; and when I read about debates that are going on in these areas I believe I know, even if I cannot follow it all, what kind of row or celebration is taking place. Subject-styles, back then, were well reflected in the content of bookshelves. The geologists had ...”

“... order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been ...”

“... we that love her so much? These questions rise and fall like the sound of distant applause as you read the Christie’s catalogue. And occasional answers can seem to spring from the pictures and descriptions of the objects themselves. The book is a slick and a morbid affair: the clothes are really nothing without Marilyn in them; many of the photographs show ...”

“... much as to say that, over the centuries, the common reader, who (it is a hundred to one) has never read the Farther Adventures, has not been in a position to appreciate Robinson Crusoe. A more plausible ethical interpretation is proposed by Laura Curtis in The Elusive Daniel Defoe. It is that we are to relate the island life constructed by Robinson Crusoe to ...”

“... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...”

“... agonise about their great texts being predominantly Anglo-European.) Can an African-American read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a ‘great book’ and nothing more? There was much agitation. Banners were unfurled (mainly for the benefit of the press) proclaiming ‘Get your racist education at Stanford.’ The acronym DWEM (dead white European ...”

“... with a marvellous world of concealment, the possibility of a second existence.’ Much later we read: ‘Everything seemed to indicate that Jaromil’s enormous yearning for newness (the religion of the New) was only the disguised longing of a virginal youth for the unimaginable experience of the sex act. When he first reached the blissful shore of the ...”

“... in fact, since there seems to be nothing that this formidably erudite historian has not read. Just as the concept of experience seems to cover everything, so Jay’s intellectual landscape is innocent of frontiers between art and sociology, philosophy and political theory. Specialism, fragmentation and the division of labour have often enough been ...”