“... nouns proliferated: Citizens (1989), Britons (1992), Commoners (1993), Aristocrats (1994). Foucault prompted genealogies of ‘isms’: orientalism, internationalism, imperialism, globalism, neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb made noun, process as subject – this is what we do. Think of all the book titles beginning ...”

“... any other, has come to epitomise Enlightenment science and even, under the influence of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (1966), Enlightenment thinking altogether. Broberg begins with contemporary descriptions of Linnaeus’s person, including Linnaeus’s own itemisation of his most prominent traits: short but muscular build, excellent ...”

“... its focus, which goes beyond the ‘Yale School’ to Jakobson, Macherey, Althusser, Barthes and Foucault on the Continental side, and Leavis, Empson, Eagleton, Jameson, Culler, Said, Rorty and others on the Anglo-American side. Wittgenstein’s relation to language and scepticism is too skimpily treated: but at least it is there. Norris’s account centres ...”

“... exploitation and at the anti-feminism of doctors, and (apart from episodes, mercifully brief, of Foucault) Kent’s argument is well-documented and straightforward. But it propagates some surprising errors: Newnham College is located in Oxford, the Government (rather than the Speaker) blocks feminist amendments to the suffrage Bill in 1913, and Mrs Snowden ...”

“... style of so-called New Historicism, with its reliance on over-general propositions attributed to Foucault, concerning the nature of power and culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and ...”

“... The British Empire – like every other empire there has ever been – scarcely needed Michel Foucault to tell it that assembling knowledge might enhance power. The men who mapped the Empire, who photographed and named its various peoples, plants and animals, who imprisoned hitherto free-floating local dialects between the covers of neat, printed ...”

“... of his fantasies depends on how the sexuality is expressed and the form it took – and if Foucault is right (which I think he must be), Carroll’s obsession belonged with a set of cultural attitudes that made it different from paedophilia today, in the same way as girls holding hands during the Southern Italian evening passeggiata aren’t announcing ...”

“... whose essay ‘Opening the Hallway’ upbraids the maestro for coming down too hard on Michel Foucault. Hall has been engaged for some time in a precarious balancing-act between socialism and Post-Modernism, class and race, epistemic realism and epistemic constructivism, and one name presiding over this trade-off in our times has been that of Antonio ...”

“... to a will to power whose genealogies have been most productively examined by Nietzsche and Foucault. Armstrong’s focus is the aspect of ‘bio-power’ concerned with active interventions (medical, mechanical, judicial, behavioural) in the human body. Interventionism, in short, is in his view the mark of the modern. The urge to intervene could be ...”

“... Is there any role, or any possibility of a role in the post-Cold War era of globalisation for what Foucault and Chomsky, each in their different ways, called intellectual resistance and even freedom? The prospects are not very encouraging, if the muddy past churned up by Who Paid the Piper? is anything to go on. I find it invigorating that Saunders, who is in ...”

“... what he seems – anyone can be that – and the effect in all these cases is very close to what Foucault describes as the ‘laughter which shakes us at the naked impossibility of thinking that’. That, in Foucault’s example, is the cataloguing of a weirdly heterogeneous number of objects and creatures as if they had ...”

“... History’. What is that? ‘A discipline that may not yet exist (despite some prototypes by Foucault and Deleuze), but whose arrival is long overdue.’ It will devote itself to ‘metaphysical notions that have infiltrated common sense and become real forces in the world’. Three pages earlier we were told that metaphysics consists of the more or less ...”

“... Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them ...”

“... to debates about religion and the supernatural. They were never the total institutions imagined by Foucault, the outcrops of a vast discursive shift in the policing of minds. It was difficult to end up in an asylum, unless your relatives agreed to do the paperwork to send you there. A majority of those who were committed stayed for less than a year and were ...”

“... in the unconscious, the gaze holds a threat of castration – have a Surrealist orientation. Even Foucault and Deleuze alluded to the movement. In the late 1960s they looked back on Surrealism as the moment when ‘the simulacrum’ – an image that is neither representational nor abstract but which retains a resemblance to the world even as it affirms no ...”