“... traditional answers. Consensus may at best be only a temporary phenomenon in a nation which, as John Ardagh says in this revised edition of his book, is racked by uncertainty and anxiety. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ no longer being acceptable other than for the extreme parties, there is now talk of le bloc social-démocrate and le bloc ...”

“... her willed vertigo. At the end of the novel, the narrator recalls a conference ‘sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, at which eight members of the Kennedy Administration gathered at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys to reassess the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis’. In its own, individual paragraph she gives us the following ...”

“... romance.’ Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton draws a similar lesson from the dangerous career of John Barton, Chartist and trade-unionist. Uneducated, lacking wisdom and judgment, his one clear feeling was hatred to the one class and keen sympathy with the other ... The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of ...”

“... Small, Good Thing’. I think that they did a good job too. KB: A few weeks ago I saw the film of John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’. RC: Isn’t that just a wonderful film? I saw it when it first came out, and I talked to John Cheever about it. We were teaching together in Iowa. He claimed he just took the money and never ...”

“... victims, who kept on being willing no matter how they were treated. Miller cites the case of John McMaster, at one time ‘first Pope of the Church of Scientology’, who later fell into disfavour. McMaster, he says, now speaks of Hubbard with enormous bitterness, always calling him ‘Fatty’. When Hubbard had him thrown overboard one day (only in ...”

“... to give a canonical stamp to work which was more appropriately read within a manuscript culture. John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea appeared in 1646, four years after the poet’s death, probably by suicide, in France. Its printer places poems to the King at the start of the volume in order to make it look like a piece of aggressive nostalgia from a dead and ...”

“... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... Some measure of the ambitiousness of Outram’s undertaking can be gained by juxtaposing it with John Lesch’s account of the emergence of French experimental physiology – a first-rate specialist monograph which, while highly rewarding, nevertheless runs on automatic pilot along the well-plotted flight-paths of the ‘internal’ history of scientific ...”

“... of this writer’s considerable output. Two contemporary English art historians, Hugh Honour and John Fleming, have produced a monumental work of retrieval, systematic certainly, but without the ambition for philosophical synthesis of their German predecessors. They bring to A World History of Art a depth of knowledge and erudition that affords an effortless ...”

“... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...”

“... school) falls to the ground. A very different approach to sex is taken by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin in The Redundant Male. Theirs is good scientific journalism, marred by snide asides. One could – snidely – say that cloning is the goal of Women’s Lib, because embryos could be developed and implanted using adult cell nuclei, and without ...”

“... for the poetry, his commentary is more than a touch reminiscent of Dr Kinbote’s stalking of John Shade’s poetic essence in Pale Fire. He leads the increasingly reluctant reader as though in a seminar, speculating on the significance of the not very significant. Despite his eloquent beginning, on Menlove’s austerely happy home background, his book ...”

“... men, but family life in our culture. The quotation-marks on the jacket are, after all, deserved. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, generally known to the world as Fanny Hill, bases itself on a female sharing of emotions – more fictitiously, but not more factitiously, than ‘Men’. Each of the two sections of the book, which were published ...”

“... over the past decade, and particularly in those of America. If American philosophers, such as John Searle, have reacted dismissively, the same has not been true of those restless denizens of the sea of texts, the literary critics. Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text, whose subtitle hopefully sandwiches Derrida between the two bastions of ...”

“... developed, to the bafflement or anger of hard-line physical-force men like O’Donovan Rossa or John O’Leary. W.B. Yeats consigned Romantic Ireland to the grave with O’Leary: Davitt discovered its terminal weakness much earlier. He outgrew the Fenian romanticism of his youth – in Moody’s words, ‘the practical revolutionist in Davitt was disgusted ...”