“... owes nothing to Classical models, is very far from being ‘primitive’ either. Like the work of Paul Zumthor in the field of medieval literature, Schapiro’s essays help us to see the inadequacy of notions of artistic norms derived from the Renaissance. ‘The standard of nature is an obstacle to critical insight,’ he remarks at one point in his ...”

“... adopting the principles of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic – did not respond to Dr Küng’s appeals against the requirement that he no longer teach as a Catholic theologian, he did only what rational ...”

“... An ow tha’s got to leather em To stop em gi’in t’nod. An some o t’same in Bible Where Paul screams fit to bust Ow men are fallen creatures But womenfolk are t’wust. Now I reckon this fired Peter, An men-talk were is goad, An culprit were our belderin God An is ancient, bullyin road. No, Pete weren’t drove by vengeance, Rountwistedness or ...”

“... with fellowships and awards. If she could overcome an addiction to the historic present she might lay claim to a considerable straight-forward descriptive skill. But this is wasted here on a chronicle of mere behaviour, unmitigated by any of the specifically human attributes of will or mind. Lettice Cooper writes a kind of novel that one would expect to be ...”

“... by leaving a roll of gauze in the nasal cavity, Freud vomited with shock but later, rather than lay the blame squarely on Fliess, began to interpret her haemorrhage psychologically. She was made of stern stuff, however (‘So this is the strong sex!’ she taunted Freud when he blenched at the blood), and blamed neither doctor, going on to become a ...”

“... warning round or two from armed looters in the port. I suspect, however, that the real attraction lay in the fact that so few others knew quite how good the Somalia story was, or indeed quite how bad. The few others became many in December. The curiosity of the American networks in particular was such that a press corps cheeseparingly estimated at three ...”

“... The Felskian postcritic slices through the supposed divide between detached, academic reading and lay reading with pleasure. These caricatures aren’t new, of course, though proponents of postcriticism argue that literary theory has pressured such concepts over the past fifty years.What postcritical reading claims to offer is a solution: tuning back in to ...”

“... with sympathy as well as humour, but also reminds us of the immense intellectual excitement that lay behind what could seem to be mere pedantry. Colocci was doubtless distracted from making progress with his treatise by his perception that it held the key to huge parts of ancient Roman civilisation – cartography, grain supply, census and tax systems, and ...”

“... coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything.’ The proximity of their daily lives fostered the sense of shared identity that Wordsworth celebrated in a fragment from 1800: My hope, my joy, my sister and my friend Or something dearer still, if reason ...”

“... stability in the first third of the 18th century. For him, Jacobitism’s primary significance lay in giving Whig politicians a convenient smear: it enabled them to denounce their political rivals, the Tories, as unreliable crypto-Jacobites who could not be trusted with office under the Hanoverians. In so far as Jacobitism had any real existence beyond the ...”

“... in confidence. What I tell him is quite wonderful, quite complicated, and altogether untrue. I lay it on thick, and he believes me.’ When the artist is all but killed by his card-playing companions, the narrator becomes his saviour and caregiver, and perhaps this is the role he unknowingly wanted: friendship as a form of unreturned devotion. Even a king ...”

“... Cezanne, I suspect, tough Aixois businessman, tight paymaster to his disappointing son Paul. Look, papa, no less than you I am a free man, my art is at no one’s service. ‘The word employé seems disgusting to me,’ Cezanne wrote aged 29. The early work – tenebrous fantasias such as The Murder, painted at much the same period in his life ...”

“... he was rushed by an enormous Great Dane. He calculated at once that his only possible escape lay in leaping over the speeding dog, but it was already too late; before he could launch himself he fell head first and was struck senseless. On waking, he had a feeling of actually coming to himself: ‘I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful ...”

“... from, or contrasted to, Gramsci the political theorist or Gramsci the revolutionary.’ Here lay the primary nexus of ‘hegemony’, in the new domestic colonialism of a weak, belated state anxious to establish its place in the European sun. Lay nationalism and forced anticlericalism were ideological compensations for ...”

“... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...”