“... It used to be said in Whitehall that the first job of a royal commission was to lay down a decent cellar. Royal commissions were grand affairs, the Rolls Royces of public deliberation, with a pedigree almost a thousand years long. Some four hundred of them were set up during the 19th century, and almost a hundred and forty in the first three-quarters of this century ...”

“... way to resolve the emotional complications of transplants. Fifteen years ago, the anthropologist Paul Rabinow introduced the concept of ‘biosociality’ to describe the bonds of community grounded in new biotechnologies. Sharp suggests we may be witnessing something more like biosentimentality. At any rate it is a field day for ethnographers, even down to ...”

“... then into a candidate for the ministry in Amsterdam; then, when that proved unworkable, into a lay preacher in the mining villages south of Mons. The letters to Theo became insistent, arduous exaltations, bricolages of biblical texts and modern hymns from the likes of Moody and Sankey. The chief fascination of this phase, for readers of the new edition, is ...”

“... stench was terrible. ‘The bones, decorated with festoons of slowly writhing, fat yellow maggots, lay in the adjoining railway siding, and were shunted into the factory whenever the furnaces were ready for them.’ He considered suicide – ‘When one’s life is going wrong in one way it seems to go wrong in every way’ – but eventually a friend helped ...”

“... labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of being ...”

“... the early years of their marriage, was benign compared to the one she published ten years later: Paul Ivory, the playwright with whom Caroline Bell has a long and self-destructive affair in The Transit of Venus. Ivory is introduced as ‘a man of promise’, which should immediately alert us. Also, he wears espadrilles. Something is awry in this man for whom ...”

“... declare that he wanted to be sure that he really was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish plebiscites; that everyone had stopped mocking him as a cuckold after his first wife had left him; that he was not, like so many of his ...”

“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... unchallenged superiority of the well-born.’ Those epigrammatic generalisations, from the pens of Paul Veyne and Peter Brown, are fairly typical of the History of Private Life at its best: a book which makes the reader think, teasing and encouraging with spicy details, long views, a capacity for the unexpected insight. Now for something completely ...”

“... of prohibitions, not in their severity. For the freeborn male in ancient Greece danger lay in sexual excess or passivity rather than the act of sex itself or the gender of the object of desire. The ideal was virility, not what we now call (in fake Greek) ‘heterosexuality’. Thus pederasty, though acceptable and even admirable, involved detailed ...”

“... most cruelly answered.Reviewing Seamus Heaney and Craig Raine in these columns (1 November 1984), Paul Muldoon insisted that Heaney’s real strength lay in the short lyric (innocently singling out for special praise ‘Widgeon’ – a poem dedicated to and ventriloquised upon Muldoon himself), and he reminded Raine that a ...”

“... light of the New Testament, beaming from a candle on a candle-stick round whose column cluster St Paul and St Peter, and whose base is supported by the symbols of the Evangelists. Groping their purblind way from the light, their backs turned to it, towards a pit, is a group of scholars and dignitaries, chiefly churchmen, headed by the Pope. Aristotle, the ...”

“... Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ‘plain-folks’, patriotic Americans, individualistic, distrustful of big government and big solutions to their problems, Shindo ...”

“... bad weather, they read Tacitus and Foscolo’s Letters of Jacopo Ortis and Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginie, first to themselves and then out loud to their hosts. How they happen to have these books with them and how they survived the storm it is best not to inquire. But they do allow for the most extraordinary scene in the book. The islanders ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”