“... we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we may with Harold Bloom, we can’t escape his influence. Anyway, the goal posts are contingent, and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse which conveys ...”

“... On the train, a little girl tells her mother ‘I want to bite you’; in a copy of Marie-Claire, she reads her horoscope, which promises she’ll meet a man, and then spends the day wondering if ‘each man I spoke to’ was the one they meant; at a cashpoint, her card is declared ‘damaged’ and she feels herself to be damaged too; shopping in ...”

“... to Haworth as soon as you can,’ Charlotte wrote on 31 August, ‘the heath is in bloom now; I have waited and watched for its purple signal as the forerunner of your coming.’ In the event a thunderstorm before Gaskell’s arrival ruined the heather’s glorious colour.* Hassall compiled her scene from different sources: Patrick’s ...”

“... as did Nina Simone and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though rather explosive-looking young workman who is emptying sand onto the ...”