“... exactly what lies gathering dust in the Columbia vaults. The most entrancing of these is ‘Santa Fe’ from the Basement Tapes sessions, which offers an example of the gift for improvisation that is so central to Dylan’s genius. Allen Ginsberg, among many others, has marvelled at Dylan’s ability to compose spontaneously at the microphone, suggesting that ...”

“... till the opera’s final moments? Derrida’s dullest segment was a discussion of title – Fr. titre – and the titration of alloys which ‘gave title’ to money. Derrida, perspiring a little, seemed to be driving harder than usual, mispronouncing more words. Was he reacting to the audience’s uneasiness? Only one person had left Derrida I; there ...”

“... a considerable post-war phenomenon, the cause of new cultural divides and personal tensions, as David Mercer’s television plays of the Sixties so clearly portrayed. For Glasser, the Sixties represented nothing much more than a ‘rejection of cultural tradition’, a nihilism ‘soon to become a badge of conformity’. His entry into the English ...”

“... that is warm with your loving:/Cold on your shuddering foot Lethe’s dread water will lap’ (David Luke’s translation). After two years’ absence, and after reimbursing Faustina quite generously, Goethe returned – or was recalled – to Weimar, to a lighter workload, with no specific responsibilities, and an increased stipend. In Frau von Stein’s ...”

“... and outer chaos is such that one occasionally imagines it could be easily made into a movie (by David Mamet, perhaps, another connoisseur of the disturbing set-up), but then come such wonderful moments as the following, when Nashe and the gambler Pozzi arrive for the big game:Nashe put the car into neutral, applied the emergency brake, and climbed out to ...”

“... do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords with the Egyptian Government of Sadat. Shepherd was one of those alarmed by Israel’s new right-wing government, headed by Menachem Begin: religious parties allied themselves with the right-wingers, rejecting Labour and the old ...”

“... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...”

“... clearly carry weight, but not necessarily an overriding weight in every case. In the 18th century David Hume affirmed, entirely truthfully, that he fully believed, like everyone else, that the sun would rise on the following day, but meanwhile the famous critique of induction – the demonstration that we can have no reason for supposing that the future will ...”

“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a ...”

“... Are counter-factuals, then, a seductive but hopeless strategy for the historical imagination? David Lewis argued in Counterfactuals (1973) that warranted counter-factuals not only had to obey causal logic, they had to imply a real alternative world, of which it seemed there must be an infinite number. Hawthorn along with earlier critics rejects this ...”

“... Other’s hands, this would have been a duller and more comprehensively researched book. Probably F.R. Leavis is long enough dead (although the keepers of his gem-like flame remain unsleepingly vigilant) for ‘journalistic’ no longer to be a term of abuse, even at Cambridge. ‘Keepers of the flame’ is, as it turns out, a somewhat over-stuffed ...”

“... figures are not unresolved in this way, nor are Degas’s, or Moore’s come to that, or even David Smith’s. It can be argued that this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists that ...”

“... to them. In 1987, the Independent published a long article by its Northern Ireland correspondent, David McKittrick, rubbishing Fred Holroyd’s claims, and saying: ‘We have established that it’ – the photograph – ‘was taken by the Garda Technical Bureau, which circulated it.’ Bruce pays tribute to McKittrick as one of his sources of ...”

“... to Arab provocations. The political climate was thus generally conducive to the use of force. David Ben-Gurion, a peppery and combative little fellow, personified this militant national mood. His instinct was to let the military have their head and to sidestep the slow-moving machinery of the United Nations. In Hebrew the UN is called Oom, and Ben-Gurion ...”

“... with biographical detail and perspicacious literary judgment. His model was Sainte-Beuve who, as F.W. Dupee, another remarkable American Sainte-Beuvian, used to say, enabled Wilson not only to be a literary portraitist but also to give you the impression that he was discovering books and authors as if for the first time. This sense of excitement ...”