“... of oure Lady Eton”, in the year 1440.’ So says Mark Dixon in An Eton Schoolboy’s Album. He may or may not have learned much history, but somewhere along the line Dixon, who left Eton in 1980, has learned how to write in an entertaining and elegant way. I find it difficult to judge the impression it might make on the ...”

“... the third and last volume of Roy Fuller’s memoirs, and it takes him up to the end of the war. It may sound ungracious, but I can’t help wondering why I find all three books so appealing that the strong implication of finality seems quite unacceptable. Though literate and pleasantly, even amusingly morose, these are not what are commonly called compulsive ...”

“... battle against workhouse pauperism, that reinforced those sterling qualities. The high-rise flats may have replaced back-to-back slums, but they also destroyed communities; similarly, the relative affluence of welfare state Britain brought in its train a whole new set of social problems. Unemployment is surely one of the most paradoxical of social ...”

“... person is, what it is to live a life, and what a life is supposed to look like (one of his stories may be that no one is in a position to tell you that). To walk into a psychoanalyst’s consulting-room, like being born into a family, is to walk into a very elaborate family of stories about who one is supposed to be. The analyst ...”

“... are received ideas about the Nativity narrative that have no warrant in either version. So, it may be asked, who cares? Yet to look into these matters is to come on problems both interesting and intractable and, to some people, important. The trickiest, the best known and perhaps the most important of these is the Virgin Conception, of which more ...”

“... which he saw, in his word, as intentional, directed towards objects in the world. We may exercise our consciousness in many ways, in hoping, declaring, commanding, promising and so on, as well as describing or referring, but Husserl regarded all such performances as one or another kind of objectifying act. For him, my declaring that you’ll get ...”

“... calls her ‘Melania Housekeeper’), who treats Klara with undisguised hostility. This may look like a human worker’s understandable reaction to the presence of a mechanical rival – a defensive response to the threat of automation – but we come to see that Melania is more concerned by what Klara’s presence means for Josie. Klara at first ...”

“... Constabulary. Denis Donoghue communicates, but does not enlarge on, the possibility that there may have been a dilemma for his parent here. There was never any doubt in one way as to which side his father was on, together with all the other Catholics of the place – that of the South. But there was a duty that went with the job, and he did it. For this ...”

“... the IRA pursue subversive political aims to a degree not found among Mafia bosses in America, who may even be portrayed at times as American patriots; and they have not enriched themselves. But that might come. One day, just foreseeably, the IRA may be ancient and affluent. Books and films about Mafia episodes tend to ...”

“... to a friend: ‘The lonelier and the more isolated I am, the more I have come to love myths.’ We may puzzle over what Aristotle meant. Did he love folk-tales, religious stories or high-minded allegories? The Greek word mythos means (centrally) ‘story’ but all stories have or acquire meanings, and we tell ourselves stories all the time. A culture is the ...”

“... and has even offered to negotiate the removal of all the SS20s from Europe. These initiatives may not, as yet, have led to any concrete agreements, nor even to any hard evidence of negotiating progress: but at least negotiations are under way again between the two super-powers, at least the angry exchanges of 1981-82 seem to be behind us, at least there ...”

“... The common reader may feel inclined to lay the same embargo on his writers as the Duke in the Elizabethan tragedy on his courtiers. Great tact, and a sustained intellectual animation to balance the much that is repulsive in the theme, were needed to make a very long book about it as attractive, as well as instructive, as this one is ...”

“... so vividly the contrast between the ideals of a revolution’s makers and the catastrophes it may be fated to endure as do the Great Purges of 1937-38 in the USSR. It was then that Stalin unleashed the NKVD in a murderous onslaught against all key sections of state and society: the Communist Party and the government apparatus, industrial management and ...”

“... war are not re-staged, perhaps because of the sheer discomfort of full armour. Yet one of these may well have been caused by reaction to the effective and extractive bureaucracy which created Domesday Book. These unpleasant episodes do not disturb the clack of the little mills of English historiography. Only when we turn to late 19th-century labour issues ...”

“... poetry and explored by his own. Beauty is no absolute guarantee of truth or morality; art may illuminate or corrupt. As David Perkins points out in Modernism and After, Pound is incomparable amongst modern poets for the rhythmic subtlety of his evocation of sensuous beauty, of the play of light and shade. For Perkins, this lyricism is the redeeming ...”