“... question, when what is considered to be beyond the realm of choice is discovered not to be. One may think, as one reads Wieseltier’s book, that what people are capable of doing, or indeed should do, to improve their lives has already been decided. So Kaddish is often driven by an exhausted realism, a seeing-through modern life which is presented as the ...”

“... be relied on to put you first. This is a discovery everyone makes sooner or later: if sooner you may end up a little bitter and twisted, but you will avoid great disappointment; if later you will almost certainly take to your word-processor and key in the story of your life. Historians in the present worry that historians in the future will be overwhelmed by ...”

“... or flagrantly unreliable evidence. Her end is predictably murky. Octavian, so the cynical say, may well have publicly paraded his disappointment at Cleopatra’s premature end, but surely he had enough guards and thugs at his disposal to have prevented her death had he really wanted to. You don’t need to go so far as to argue – and Chauveau does ...”

“... of convictions. But if a preference for clarity and coherence is an indication of paranoia we may wonder whether there is a viable alternative now to paranoia as a way of life. Abstraction – ‘striving towards structure’ – is an unpromising cure for contingency. Trotter looks to the ‘representational strategies’ of the great literary Modernists ...”

“... its armies in the field, this necessarily meant that the Western Front must have priority. This may have been Asquith’s grand strategy, faute de mieux; it was likewise Lloyd George’s, faute de mieux. For Britain, the internal politics of the war therefore turned to a large extent on whether the generals or the politicians would call the shots. The ...”

“... a genius for creating enemies. All our self-destructive behaviour, whatever else we think it is, may be an attempt to put a stop to the struggle. And if we begin to hate our own struggle for survival, we may want to suppress it in others. Clearly, our capacity to destroy other species – not to mention others that belong ...”

“... a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a contemporary British writer has come to sounding like a contemporary American; the result is disturbingly mutant. Alex-Li Tandem, the son of a Chinese father and Jewish mother, is the autograph man of the title. He buys and sells ...”

“... If, that is, a ‘memory’ is some kind of private mental property. The picture I have of her may be faintly tinted by first-hand experience, but its contours come from public documentation. Through biographies, critical writings and the tourist phenomenon of her home at Charleston, Vanessa has become a cultural commodity, and it’s this commodity I ...”

“... 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] ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to ‘Becky has a mischievous twinkle in her eye; what next?’ Liberties have been taken. It may be that I am doing D.J. Taylor an injustice. He may have found some source material hitherto unused by biographers which contradicts Thackeray’s description of the event. But if so, we would never know. His notes are even ...”

“... where Lakatos has moved centre stage. Readers who like gossip will not be disappointed. The staid may be appalled by the ribald tone of this little bit of Mitteleuropa am Aldwych. Two items in the book will be new to almost everyone. Both concern Lakatos. The first, which is already being talked about (I heard several corrupt versions before reading the ...”

“... You’ll remember this. You may not live there anymore, and it might be years since you’ve been there, but you’ll recognise it instantly. Nothing has changed. Not a thing out of place, and not a detail altered: same views, same problems, same people, same faces, same old same old. ‘I feel violent with "hate” against this bloody town ...”