“... of myself as white. In an era in which many people lament the tyranny of identity politics, it may seem healthy that the state should discourage racial or ethnic identification.Yet since returning to France twenty years later, I have become disillusioned with French pseudo-universalism. Official colour blindness did not prevent the National Rally, a party ...”

“... man. Singer’s story comes alive when he talks about his own family. His maternal grandparents, David Ernst Oppenheim and Amalie née Pollak, were remarkable. David (1881-1943) came from a distinguished line of rabbis that included David Oppenheim (1664-1736), the Chief Rabbi of ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... faith in the canon and turning to different forms of cultural studies. But their disillusion may be premature. English poetry has not been as one-sidedly conservative as is frequently supposed, and needs defending against many of its defenders – whether overt reactionaries or ‘liberal humanists’ who display an extraordinary complacency about the ...”

“... smuggling drugs. The Czechoslovak authorities who arrested Derrida this January on the same charge may have been repeating the classic mistake of metaphysics by taking language as reality. Although having risked imprisonment in the name of the free discussion of philosophy certainly makes Derrida a political hero, it still will not make him a philosophical ...”

“... miles gloriosus, the military boaster or eternal bag of bullshit’. So he might seem, but readers may feel that this Farthing is no soldier and that Mr Brown is surely a professional actor. We turn the page, expecting them to be exposed as liars. Then the style changes. We are surprised by a genuine page of news items reproduced from the Gentleman’s ...”

“... from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed ...”

“... black police officer. The pictured times move from the 19th century to the 1950s to the 1970s. We may not have recognised the first shot as coming from Gone with the Wind, but we’ll certainly have picked up the presentation of the American South and the Civil War. As for the connections among the three scenes, we’re still waiting for the film to start and ...”

“... men performing public roles. An artist who found his work in the king’s collection, though he may have seen it lost from public view, was not in the pay of a private individual. As Cowen points out, the great era of private patronage is the present day, when unheard-of numbers of private individuals are able to contribute something to artistic ...”

“... array of Russian thinkers such as Leo Shestov, who emphatically rejected the logic of identity: A may be equal to A, but then again it may not. There is some overlap between Shestov and a thinker who is now better-known, Mikhail Bakhtin; both celebrate forms of discourse that dispense with a fixed subject position and set ...”

“... the life of its body, lived openly in observable actions and secretly only in neural events that may soon become accessible to observation. When the mind is reduced in this way, it becomes unrecognisable, especially to its owner. Only a resolute refusal to admit anything impalpable could push philosophers to such an extreme, but the refusal would be ...”

“... on both sides of the Atlantic. Dressed in a carefully chosen series of gowns – by Deirdre David’s report, the wardrobe consisted of black or red velvet for the tragedies, white or pastel satin for the comedies, and dark green or blue brocade for the history plays – and with no props other than a large reading desk, some piled-up books and a pair ...”

“... sovereign that this nation has ever known. Even his sons, who enjoyed a bad press in their day, may have escaped complete derision because they were more involved with charitable associations and voluntary societies than posterity has generally recognised. Predictably, George IV was less generous to others than his father had been, while being much more ...”

“... something else again’ in the course of his alphabet-surfing. The fairy realm of the féth fíada may not only be contiguous to ours but ‘contaygious’ too (the book’s fourth section takes its title from a ballad beginning ‘In Egypt’s land, contaygious to the Nile’). Where Auden has given us the Lords of Limit, Muldoon gives us Lords of ...”

“... is now published here on another page. However, a biography which elicits that sort of response may always be doing so because it is particularly penetrating. I find this biography difficult to assess fairly because of the irritation it provokes both through its crass handling of the English language and through its snide attitude towards the supporting ...”