“... he has been living in a ‘cell’, ‘a poor cell’ in fact, or even a ‘full poor cell’. It may sound like a grotto, if a minimalist one, but it is never called that.Shakespearean drama would only acquire a grotto decades later. While Edmund is feigning remorse at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version ...”

“... if not beyond criticism, beyond dispraise. ‘I am not unbiased about Israel,’ he writes to David Astor in 1958, ‘I like them all, or nearly all, too well, & think that despite their faults and crimes they have developed a form of life … which is morally more attractive than any that I’ve seen elsewhere, because it is egalitarian without being ...”

“... she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.’ David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, gets it right: ‘She seems to be smart, impressive and honest – and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.’ Whatever her own views ...”

“... ambitions are thwarted, who has delusions of grandeur and power. If there’s a pretty maid he may ask her bluntly whose mistress she is. When he thinks he has his man he sticks to him like a limpet, waiting for him to break down. In A Man’s Head, certain that a young Czech immigrant is the guilty party but without any evidence to nail him, Maigret ...”

“... shows that at every stage of Peace’s life, his gifts were not just recognised but cultivated. He may have started selling marijuana to help his mother pay the rent, but his family didn’t have the crippling debts that frequently end any possibility of class mobility. He was the valedictorian at his prestigious high school, and a wealthy banker, moved by his ...”

“... with their shouting matches, awkward silences and lengthy airings of patients’ grievances, may have been a grindingly slow and inefficient way of advancing hospital policy. But by refusing the supreme power invested in the asylum director, Basaglia accelerated the process of negation from within: nurses were slowly converted, and patients, feeling that ...”

“... that amounts almost to a rewrite of history. Cogent though Brown’s facts and Lloyd’s rhetoric may be, both authors show a fatal eagerness to please. How odd it is that a decade of Thatcher has not taught Labourites the essential distinction between being liked and being respected. The Prime Minister has demonstrated a willingness to take life and to risk ...”

“... less as a deliberate attempt to shock than to show how down to earth these courtiers were. Or it may just be laziness, there being some skill in inventing euphemisms or devising elaborations that get round obscenity. Still, an enjoyable film, if an anachronistic one, e.g. ‘the opposition’ not a feature of Parliament in the 18th century.11 February. A ...”

“... to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them’, it may sound like the usual, gendered fashion hyperbole, but I believe him. Those who admired his work as an observer of fashion – and he was much praised in the last years of his life – invariably emphasised his disregard for worldly pleasure. He had a spartan ...”

“... aware of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted ...”

“... reward. That is, MacArthur stakes a wager on potential: it is not what you have done, but what you may do, which is judged, or prejudged. ‘The kid will go far,’ is the message they send. Such prophecy is notoriously inaccurate. The MacArthur operation has not been going long enough for one to see how many out-and-out winners they have in fact chosen ...”

“... anything nowadays except the theory of science? His own answer to this question is affirmative. It may seem that the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition in philosophy – the tradition that goes back to Frege and Russell and whose most prominent living representatives are Quine, Davidson, Dummett and Putnam – must return a negative answer. For that tradition ...”

“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... Britain (an honour Freud, much to Jones’s chagrin, later conferred on Jones’s friend and rival David Eder). He was Freud’s chief administrator and enforcer – he served as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949 – and his most enthusiastic missionary. He did more than anyone to ...”

“... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...”