“... the token tenantry of rustic characters, enigmatic, pragmatic, dogmatic, deeply enduring. Readers may detect an odour of Lawrence here and there, or catch a whiff of Cold Comfort Farm: but the scene is deepest Ireland. Onto this pastoral-mythical set Mr McGinley brings the machinery of a plot derived from the parable of the talents. On his 77th ...”

“... right-wing electoral politics, through the generation of co-operative economic development, and may prove to be a far more powerful agent for North American interests than the CIA can ever be. As developmental economists realised in the Sixties, and as the American banks were to learn in the Eighties, underdevelopment, once the underpinning of the European ...”

“... to remain, on first-name terms with the media phenomenon whose personal and material success may often have been envied or deplored in his lifetime, but is now applauded everywhere – very properly when measured against the talent and hard work invested in it, less so when it is seen as another rallying-point for the enemies of Modernism. If in the ...”

“... well until Avril, Orwell’s sister, turned up and decided she wanted to stay. Susan Watson ‘may have felt overly sensitive to any criticism from Avril, and in her own mind the comments about her disability may have taken on more importance than Avril had intended. But she could not have been mistaken about the feeling ...”

“... British popular politics. The present series is a selection and not the complete output, and we may be thankful for that. It could have been pruned down more. I find Volume I – Political Writings I – superfluous, apart from the editor’s general introduction to the series; as are Volumes VI, Essays, and VII, Religious Writings. These will be useful to ...”

“... Here is John Locke on the subject of second-hand knowledge in philosophy and the sciences: we may as rationally hope to see with other men’s eyes as to know by other men’s understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our ...”

“... case, could you please be so good as to return it to me. My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to you or to your publishers. Thank you. ‘Dear Mr Peters,’ the reply went, ‘Mr Greene has not received your passport and he can’t imagine for what reason you sent your passport to him for safe-keeping as he is not in the habit of being a ...”

“... word’s range of reference can appear to trivialise the tragedy it originally designated. There may even be grounds for suspecting that the multiplication of parallels to the Judcocide is itself a form of covert anti-semitism. In these circumstances, trying to define the Holocaust in terms appropriate to it seems more than defensible. All the same, you ...”

“... with funds of inexperience and self-illusion. So he writes to his mother at the beginning of May: Good God! how superior is London to that despicable place Bristol! Here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities ... The poverty of authors is a common observation, but not always a true one. No author can be poor who understands ...”

“... Eliza Haywood’s snooze-inducing The British Recluse from 1722 (‘a sad Example of what Miseries may attend a Woman, who has no other Foundation for belief in what her Lover says to her, than the good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like ...”

“... murderous at all, but detailed, exigent, measured, beady-eyed. Nor is she a Boswell, however. She may have become an accepted figure in the McCarthy landscape in the years leading up to McCarthy’s death in 1989, interviewing and taking notes, but she proves tough-minded and independent to a degree. The tone is one of unforgiving intimacy. It’s ...”

“... To be good at music as a child is not always an unmixed blessing. It brings complications that may take a lifetime to smooth out. For some, a musical gift may prove to be a poison (Gift in the German sense). A child who is spoken to by music will quickly learn to speak through music. This is what adults call talent, and ...”

“... the Intolerable’ and ‘The New Calculus of Olfactory Pleasure’, so one may expect few concessions to the hilarity that sometimes marks lay responses to disorderly ordure. Freud was unusual in devoting some attention to the relatively feeble olfactory powers of human beings, and philosophers, as Corbin remarks, have tended to ignore ...”

“... to fill it. A collection of essays entitled The New Museology suggests where suitable candidates may be found. Paul Greenhalgh is one. He cheerfully announces that ‘in these times of desperate financial pressure’ – can he be referring to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘economic renaissance’? – museums ‘cannot exist simply as a receptacle guarding our ...”

“... intellectuals looking to build the New Jerusalem of the welfare state. Though this may sound like the traditional realist complaint that things have gone to the dogs because misguided and incompetent idealists have been in charge, it isn’t quite. For Barnett subscribes to an idealism of his own: the view that a thorough purge of the public ...”