“... Suppose​ a friend you trust more than any other, who taught you the meaning of friendship, lets you down suddenly, and then persistently ceases to fulfil the expectations you have come to have of them. Would you give up all your friends? Would you simply avoid that particular friend? Would you try to have it out, which probably wouldn’t work, but would, if you held your nerve, change your relationship to yourself as much as your understanding of the other, ‘a deepening in the notion one holds of friendship … learnt from possibly unintended mistakes’?Of the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite ...”

“... the publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in the earlier books, particularly the father’s death in Book 1. Actually, if you want to begin here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first.Q. Is this fiction or ...”

“... but remorseless, urbane yet gritty. It is germane to the American culture wars but vastly more interesting. It is an adventure story in itself, and a stepping-stone to better ones. My only regret is that this book – you can think of it as the third of a trilogy – will be more widely read than Sahlins’s ...”

“... in seeing it as the key to much in Burke. O’Brien’s explanation employs historical concepts more real and convincing than Kramnick’s, which blends Marx and Freud in an ultimately clumsy synthesis; and it points correctly to Yeats’s third mistake. Burke did not ‘hate Whiggery’: he loved it and hated it. Dr O’Brien is at his least satisfying ...”

“... synthetic pheromone aren’t introduced.This is Jaynes’s explanation for a response that seems more like the breakdown of a machine than a reaction to threat. The Inca had no precedents for these ‘rough, milk-skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead of from their scalps so that their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with ...”

“... all, it was I who did that.” But those tables proclaimed the rights of a man who could no more be the man of ancient society than his national-economic and industrial relationships could be those of antiquity.’ My aim is to start out from Saint-Just’s illusion, and by asking what made it an illusion, to raise a question about the interpretation of ...”

“... who had worked in the First World War in Room 40at the Admiralty. They at once recruited ten more Kingsmen as well as other Cambridge dons and some German linguists. The most fertile fields they reaped were those of the Classics and Ancient History, both subjects in which evidence has to be pieced together by drawing inferences from fragmentary ...”

“... Before her death, Larsen made a last attempt to visit Anna, from whom she’d been estranged for more than thirty years, and returned in a deep depression. On learning that she had been left $35,000 in Larsen’s will, Anna exclaimed: ‘Why, I didn’t know I had a half-sister!’ Larsen was five when the Jim Crow laws passed. In the South, she wouldn’t ...”

“... way and flies, immediately and without waiting for applause, out of the story. There is much more to tell. Amis can’t leave the canal fauna alone, the nature stuff of Camden. There is a minatory ‘dead duck, head down with its feet sticking up like the arms of a pair of spectacles’. Another vivid aperçu (stopping the drift), like . . . like . . . a ...”

“... captured in 1945 by Millicent Todd Bingham in her introduction to Bolts of Melody, a selection of more than six hundred poems culled from the vast trove of papers then in her possession. The papers were given to Bingham’s mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, by Dickinson’s sister Lavinia. (This is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham ...”

“... need and an elaborate prank. He seems to have felt uncomfortable being serious in public, the more so as the public warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother ...”

“... and asks to borrow four eggs, which he then clumsily drops on the floor. He asks for four more, and as she reluctantly complies he drops her mobile phone in the kitchen sink. He leaves but promptly returns with another young man, slim and slick and clearly the leader of the pair. Nothing like the lowlifes in The Desperate Hours or Cape Fear, these ...”

“... building’s cellar, believing that rats creep up from it at night. It starts scaring him even more when Annie, the upstairs neighbours’ slightly older daughter, lures him into a cupboard in which her mother keeps a rat trap. Annie offers to teach him how to ‘play bad’: ‘Yuh must say, Yuh wanna play bad? Say it!’ He trembled. ‘Yuh wanna play ...”

“... was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish plebiscites; that everyone had stopped mocking him as a cuckold after his first wife had left him; that he was not, like so many of his fellow writers, an embusqué in some ministry or on some ...”

“... old enough to have made use of public phone booths on a regular basis will know that they were more often than not damp, cold, filthy and foul-smelling, and while amply supplied with the phone numbers of prostitutes, practically impossible to make any sort of call from. So folk memory insists, at any rate. So literature insists too. Urban phone booths in ...”