“... entails a deliberate splitting of art from political events: an ‘irrationalist fatalism’, as Frank Lentricchia would have it; or, for Terry Eagleton, a covert polemic against Marxism. And scholars whose entire orientation proceeds from Heidegger’s or de Man’s writing are forced to explain how a person can be both theoretically compelling and ...”

“... engineers manqué and are regarded with suspicion by those who spend their lives in the lab or the field. That Crick has largely – though never entirely – escaped this suspicion is a tribute both to his undisputed brilliance and to his success in choosing a series of superb experimentalists with whom to work. As he and Watson pointed out in their famous ...”

“... the governors of the University, including the Bishop of Cork and the farmer he canvassed in his field whose only question was: ‘A professor of English? Can you talk Irish?’ He was overwhelmingly defeated for the job by Daniel Corkery, who had the same Republican credentials but a much more potent neo-Wagnerian ideology of race and nationality. When his ...”

“... to become residuals (and hence very difficult to relate to anything real). Solow and Temin are frank: ‘The usual routine, in the absence of anything better, is to treat technology as the ultimate residual ... This is particularly unsatisfying to the historian.’ So it is that many historians, while finding the national income aggregative approach ...”

“... pass a bonfire of rags and oil in the village and suddenly, in an overwhelming moment, I was in a field in Normandy and the next tank, with my friends in it, was burning and about to explode. I think I then understood the professional culture of distance. Its antiseptic presentation of the images of war was skilled but childish. This sense was deepened by the ...”

“... arguments finally break out and break down. BS501 (and PS501 too) await their textbook writers. Frank Kermode’s masterguides are not such men. As Leach, for instance, explains, he is not offering stock answers to any stock questions. Indeed, he warns, anyone who read him for this would be put down by most examiners as ...”

“... because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth. ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start. The letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies who wanted to ...”

“... deduce that, like Edgar, he has all these years pretended to be mad? Or that the bibliographer’s field has been as ravaged by fearful elements as King Lear’s heath? Perhaps, more romantically, Mr Laurence pictures himself as Browning’s supernatural knight, anxious and enigmatic, whose savage trample to the dark tower over the bones of his predecessors ...”

“... had to be kept apart for 200 pages by misunderstandings, misadventures and backchat. Boon had to field objections not only from the tyrannous ‘Biddy’ Johnson of Woman’s Weekly and the stern male law-givers of Dundee, but from Mrs Mary Bonnycastle, of Harlequin Books in Winnipeg, to whom he supplied doctor-nurse novels in an endless stream and who was ...”

“... of whinstone and ponds of dark, still water. By the 1950s the only farmland left was a potato field and a stretch of grazing that supported two Clydesdale horses we knew as Clyde and Prince. Most of the rest of this small area – those bits not occupied by houses, quarries, roads and railway tracks – was owned by the War Office, which had appreciated ...”

“... and ready to make a new conquest, just as it is an extraordinarily adept configuration of the field for those who may come to the subject weary from old failures to understand, or convinced that it is either marginal or obscure. What is strikingly original is that the five expositors, each of them a well-known expert in his ...”

“... instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears ...”

“... difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be the play of the child’s confused and obscure notation of it.’ Maisie cannot be expected to possess a full understanding of the doings of her divorced parents (‘the ...”

“... society in which even the regime’s opponents were unable to think and speak outside the force-field of official norms. Of the half-dozen biographies of Sakharov, Jay Bergman’s is the most probing, though none of them, it must be said, surpasses Sakharov’s own disarmingly frank account of his life. Like the Tokyo art ...”

“... out disputes at the Poetry Society. Neo-Georgian versifiers and poetry-fancying grandees like Field Marshal Wavell began to mobilise against her after she took control of the society’s magazine in 1947. Both then and during her subsequent explorations of freelance life with Derek Stanford, a boyfriend and collaborator who became one of her major ...”