“... is free to shed its urgency. In defining Critical Condition as a protest against the present, I may be making the book sound more coherent than it is. Technically, it isn’t a book, but a collection of eight essays, four of which have been previously published. Gubar herself claims that ‘there is no plot to the book,’ but she is too modest: if you like ...”

“... Thing. Well, not quite, for what he really opposed was what Blake called ‘single vision’: ‘May God us keep/From Single vision – Newton’s sleep.’ Which can only encourage a belief in Feyerabend’s anti-scientism. His most widely known book, Against Method (1975), was intended to be one of a pair of books, the other written by Imre Lakatos, who ...”

“... Elton . . . pioneered the practice of microhistory’ in his Star Chamber Stories (1958). Elton may have been a great historian; he certainly dominated the study of Tudor history through the 1960s and 1970s. But it would have been hard to find anyone more hostile to the new social sciences, or to French theory, and Cressy knows full well that Elton would ...”

“... Johnson’s speech all over the place, making his hero clearer, making him morally stronger. There may be no reason for us to fuss over this, but it does raise questions about Boswell’s method: are his alterations the work of memory, or are they choices in aid of invention?On Saturday [1 May] ...”

“... about God and the world; hence he adopts an attitude to authority which is bifold – authorities may tell us truths which we cannot ourselves apprehend, or they may hoodwink us with nonsense. Therefore on some points authorities must be trusted even if one experiences their absurdity; on others they might be compared with ...”

“... and no wonder – while men postpone commitment, her eggs are already scrambling. The young mother may be advised to give up work till her children are older or she may be urged to fight for government policies and workplace changes that would enable her more easily to combine both roles. But basically the books all give the ...”

“... Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by ...”

“... locals don’t love them. They’re convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favourite stories about itself. These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture. That ...”

“... diagnosis that did nothing to effect a cure’. His sessions with four or five different analysts may not have helped him much, but they certainly generated a number of good poems, such as ‘The psychiatrist’s song’, ‘The psychiatrist speaks’ and ‘The psycho-analyst’; in the last of these the analyst is figured as embodying, like advertising, an ...”

“... only in the final painting is a door indicated; otherwise, there seems no means of escape. There may be pictures on the wall, but not of the sort that offers any view outwards; darkly unreadable, they return us to the intense clusters of men. Occasionally, a slight relief comes in the form of flowers, or fruit, or a carafe of wine, and there is a red ...”

“... in a series of poems in which the reader finds certain emotions being dissected, emotions she may feel while reading. ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ starts as a painful memory of his dad’s attempt to buy an expensive needle ‘for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable’, which made the salesman splutter at their pretension: ‘still smirking, he sent us ...”

“... at a New York college who believes he is being framed for sex crimes against his students, may also have encouraged her to get hold of the wrong end of the stick: Lasdun was known to be fascinated by the sex and power dynamics of pupil-teacher relationships, and Nasreen had read the book ‘closely’. But her moments of lucidity became less ...”

“... to accuse its creator of shallowness. The facility for which Sargent would later become famous may have been evident in the speed with which he painted this picture (approximately seven feet square, it seems to have been completed in six weeks), but there is nothing facile or slick about the image itself, which is more likely to unsettle viewers than it is ...”

“... found as early as Dante), or even a set of seven couplets. Within each of these variations there may be further variations: do the quatrains hide a couplet within them (abba) or do they make up a couplet of rhymes (abab)? Should ‘a’ and ‘b’ rhymes dominate the octave, or can ‘c’ and ‘d’ jostle their way in too? The sonnet is a toolkit for ...”

“... having with their children. But I don’t think Davis’s great importance comes from the way she may or may not be talking about Lydia Davis. Writers tend to be either narcissists or voyeurs (though of course one can be both), and Davis is much more interested in other people than she is in herself. Even when she is ...”