“... descriptive dimensions altogether. In the Cubist works of 1911 or 1912, objects or even objecthood may still be denoted through tokens and fragments – the famous stencilled letters; the mustachios of The Poet; the moustaches, buttons and sleeve ends of Man with a Pipe – but they have been wholly overtaken by signification itself, by an ever freer play of ...”

“... Wall movement, which was itself echoed in Tiananmen. Both protests claimed descent from the May Fourth movement of 1919, when students rallied in Beijing against the humiliating terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty. The heroic spirit of May Fourth pulled in artists and intellectuals of many persuasions and was ...”

“... swiftly along and has hardly time to ask himself, “Is this fact or fiction or both?” till he may be led to search, as not a few have searched before him, for The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell.’ The point of the Joseph Sell hint is that Borrow claimed to have written a novel of that name. In fact, a whole chapter of his ...”

“... Frenchmen in the light of what was to come. In this respect, he diverges from Heinrich Böll, who may be the most humane and painfully merciful of Catholic novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and nastiness, vanity, callousness, lust for blood, but – like a ...”

“... references to French names unknown across the Channel could put English readers off: but curiosity may prevail with a British public which finds itself abruptly transported into the unfamiliar territory of French political life under the Third and Fourth Republics. The book was written during the 1970s, in the climate created by the Union of the Left, and all ...”

“... Neostoicism is neither as difficult nor as remote a subject as it may sound, although to grasp its full importance we would need a keener sense than most of us have of the pressing relevance of Classical Antiquity to the thought and values of Renaissance Europe. The term is given by historians to the cult of Stoic ethics – especially of Senecan ethics – at the courts and universities of the late 16th and early 17th centuries ...”

“... the film The American Dreamer meets his match in the man who now redeems An American Dream. There may have been much of Mailer in Gilmore, too, the religious, superstitious, existentialist Gilmore. But it is part of the simple sanity of the book that such things are now subjected to an intimate vigilance. ‘Whether the life is criminal or not,’ Mailer once ...”

“... relevant to the assessment of the truth value of moral statements; 4. There are moral facts (that may or may not be claimed to be reducible in some way to non-moral facts); 5. When two moral statements conflict as recommendations to action, only one statement can be true; 6. There is a single true morality. 7. ‘When ...”

“... Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced. In May 1983 he declared that Fairfield Porter ‘is going to have to be recognised as one of the classics of our art’. As for ‘neo-expressionism’ and ‘maximalism’, the latest, or almost the latest, thing, he notes that, unlike Pop Art, which made an ...”

“... upon Harold Jenkins’s magisterial Arden and Philip Edwards’s serious Cambridge version.1 It may well be asked by non-Shakespearians and non-publishers whether all this editorial activity is needed, and by whom, and the Oxford team anticipates the question by asserting the boldness as well as the unparalleled scope of its enterprise. It is worth asking ...”

“... to Melchior’s father from his agents in Paris, Berlin, London and Prague, each of whom, one may assume, had been given certain guidelines on what to buy, since, for example, the London agent appears to have bought mostly finely-illustrated ornithological texts; the Paris agent, new books from the private presses; the Berlin agent, bound collections of ...”

“... Essays of Bertrand Russell in Russell, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives. The prophecy may come true, but even if I were to survive as long as Russell, I am unwilling to bet that I should be around to see it fulfilled. The prospectus appeared in Volume XII of Russell, the date of which was Winter 1973-4. Now, ten years later exactly, we have the ...”

“... Sindona were members of P2 and both contributed extensively to Gelli’s financial activities. In May 1981, P2 was exposed in a blaze of publicity which kept every newspaper and television station in Italy busy for months, brought down the Government, and ultimately led to the election of the first non-Christian Democrat prime minister since the war. The ...”

“... enlightened rule. It is certainly true that Gomulka sought a ‘national way’, and he may have intended the sort of pluralism that the French Communist Party used to speak of in the early 1970s, meaning tolerance for parties of the Left; and, as Ascherson argues, he did create conditions in which the Stalin era was less bloody and shorter than ...”

“... sake the choice of assumed name should be arbitrary and inscrutable. In some cases, there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who ...”