“... running gear (white shorts, sleeveless vest, bare feet in leather running shoes so thin they look more like ballet pumps), he’s down on his haunches, leaning forward, waiting for the starting gun. There are no competing runners nearby; he was obviously posing for the camera. But the photo isn’t a fake. Coppard was 23 at the time. For the previous eight ...”

“... that ‘soon’ express a wish or a regret? Does the narrator know? We are not going to hear much more from him, since he is only a page away from his last words. All he can really say about Albertine is ancient and obvious and rather beautiful: that he used to watch her sleep and that she is dead. ‘Profonde Albertine, que je voyais dormir et qui était ...”

“... Caesar had begun to fray, but it cast a shadow over everything else. Cicero still won trials far more often than he lost them, but he lacked the will and the ability to trim his sails to each passing breeze. He still wanted to steer a middle course, to pursue the concordia ordinum – a harmony of the social orders – and not the extremism now embraced on ...”

“... book consists of an attack on the claims of philosophy to provide ethical answers to the question. More precisely (since it never quite explains what is to count as philosophy), it attacks the claims of a certain rationalistic and foundationalist method in moral philosophy, a method broadly though not exclusively associated with Kant. In general, Professor ...”

“... generally regarded as anthropophagy at its most respectable. The Antaeus piece is the jazzier and more anecdotal, though the level of self-exposure is modest (Davenport owns up to living by preference on fried baloney, Campbell’s soup and Snickers bars). The title is ‘The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward’, ‘geophagy’ being the ...”

“... Cassandra somewhat backhandedly, suggesting that her weeding-out and censorship ‘shows itself more in the complete destruction of letters rather than in the excision of individual sentences; the “portions cut out” usually only amount to a very few words, and from the context it would seem that the subject concerned was physical ailment.’ Le Faye ...”

“... suspicious of the swift and brash generalisations that stole the headlines a decade and more ago. Collinson has written two earlier major works, one on Elizabethan Puritanism, the other a life of Edmund Grindal, Elizabeth’s defiant Archbishop of Canterbury. Here he moves forward into the reign of James I. This has been the dark period of the ...”

“... of travel between the Indian and the Greek worlds, but specialists would probably demand more detailed evidence, notably with respect to the earliest influence. My concern, however, is limited to his arguments for Buddhism as a solution to current intellectual and moral problems. Le Bonheur-Liberté is an exceptional work by most criteria. Its author ...”

“... not in outright exile. Günter Grass’s new novel, Eine weites Feld, proposes another solution, a more radical and scandalous one. The scandal predictably aroused the outrage of all those (and they were and are many) who thought that politics could now be abandoned once and for all, and that in Germany, as elsewhere in the world, after the alleged triumph of ...”

“... bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India.’ Tariffs of 70 per cent and more were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded the Indian market. Bishop Heber, that acute observer and author of the lines ‘though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’, reported that ‘the peasantry in the ...”

“... was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in ...”

“... rougher extramural suburb of St Giles). These are community connections. But what else – what more specifically – has drawn him into this prosecution, and into the rather murky story that lies behind it? This new material about Mountjoy does not impinge directly on Shakespeare, who had not lived at his house for some years, and who is anyway not ...”

“... the proportioning of Moody’s biography is misguided. In this new third volume he devotes more space to Pound’s last decade, during which he wrote and said little, than he gives in Vol. I to Pound’s first twenty years. It’s worth bearing in mind, for example, that he was born at the end of a century when hundreds of American institutions had ...”

“... served his time as the ultimate insider. He offered a bridge between the traditionalist past and a more dynamic future. But he still needed the votes, and doubtless he and his supporters did whatever it took to secure them. (As Mandeville said of papal politics, Machiavelli is no guide: he isn’t cynical enough.) It took Wojtyla three days to get there – it ...”

“... for contempt against him for his failure to answer the first one. There was still no response. More orders followed, each threatening consequences more severe than the one before if Hunnyngs refused to answer the writ and produce Witherley. Released at last, Witherley in 1605 applied for fresh attachments against his ...”