“... that will be immune to social and historical distortions, Foucault’s interpretive analytics is more modest and avowedly pragmatic. The methods and results of his histories of the prison and of sexuality are recognisably influenced by social practices, which can only be investigated and diagnosed from within. But we are not as rigidly fixed in these social ...”

“... Auden who created the style which most of his contemporaries sought to imitate, and it is Auden, more than Yeats or Eliot, who is influencing younger poets today. Why Auden’s early style should matter so much sixty years later can be explained, I think, with reference to the success of Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever ...”

“... succeeded in wresting the hegemony from Savile Row. Yet Savile Row dominated male fashion for more than a century, just as the rue de la Paix has dominated female fashion. Tailors have never been given the credit that has gone to couturiers. They have stayed in the shadows, sitting cross-legged or wielding their tape-measures in traditional obscurity. The ...”

“... Kitchener, Jack London or Franz Liszt (he came to tell the children to practise their instruments more frequently). But the barmy, scrambled upbringing wasn’t always innocent or even well-intentioned. Although Barnes later said that she loved her grandmother Zadel ‘as a child usually loves its mother’, Philip Herring quotes letters to her from Zadel ...”

“... through time by a shared belonging to something that seems to emerge from a steadier, thicker, more grounded past and be on its way to an indestructible, maybe redeeming future. Anderson is the very opposite of an atheist in the face of this religion; or, if he is an unbeliever – and one senses in all of his writings an extraordinary final outsidedness ...”

“... may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic ...”

“... incompletion (his two best-known novels, according to Italo Calvino, ‘seem to need only a few more pages to reach their conclusions’) goes with a confusion as to the chronology of composition and a concern that the version we hold in our hands is not definitive. First published in book form in 1963, Acquainted with Grief, or early parts of it, had ...”

“... from that of their wary younger colleagues. Nowadays people take fewer organic diseases, and more social and psychological conditions, to their doctors. Those organic conditions they do bring are usually chronic, and harder to treat. They bring them earlier than they used to, which makes diagnosis more difficult. They ...”

“... years before the Battle of Waterloo. As a teenager, through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many ...”

“... of a love affair:I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that ...”

“... picture of the tensions within contemporary philosophy is not altogether wrong. But a more detailed account of the history of philosophy in the 20th century would distinguish between a first, scientistic, phase of analytic philosophy and a second, anti-scientistic, phase. Between 1900 and 1960 most admirers of Frege would have agreed with ...”

“... o’clock salons – known as ‘a Menagerie of Live Authors’ – introduced her to the work of Thomas Paine, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Johnson taught her to ‘offend, alienate and strenuously disagree’ in her unsigned pieces for his monthly Analytical Review; with his encouragement she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of ...”

“... questions seek ways to prompt or direct the domestic courts to interpret or apply rights more restrictively than they have done under the Human Rights Act.The consultation asks how we can ‘make sure deportations that are in the public interest are not frustrated by human rights claims’ and canvasses views on how the UK could address ‘the ...”

“... he sang them into mawkish sentiment, song by song. He was a great singles artist: he sang, perhaps more than anyone else in the popular imagination, for three minutes at a time. There is no consistent, cumulative, considered body of work bequeathed to us – and therefore probably no unified field theory that will embrace Elvis and America. The King ...”

“... A modern criminal trial can be exceedingly inconvenient. The more fairly conducted it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot ...”