“... why Austen readers could find her thoroughly disturbing. Jane Austen and her contemporaries had a frank curiosity about one another’s personalities and lives which often at the time came under fire as vulgar prying. A passion for gossip at all levels made the early 19th century an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking ...”

“... customs with which they deal, derives from Binchy’s long essay and the other labourers in his field to whom he refers, as far back as that almost legendary figure Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who in virtual solitude composed or induced in 1853, unaided, out of his vast erudition, the first-ever grammar of a tongue one word of which he had never heard spoken and ...”

“... Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of Peterborough, is also alive to the openings offered by high-handed Tory reform in local government and the ...”

“... and spending four years in the Philippines working for MacArthur, who had a retirement job as Field-Marshal of the tin-pot Philippine Army. When Eisenhower was no longer his golden boy, MacArthur termed him ‘a good clerk, nothing more’. Pearl Harbour brought Eisenhower directly under another Chief of Staff, George Marshall, who immediately sent for ...”

“... a picture show,’ she says, ‘I feel like the norm’; ‘I’m wide open, I’m frank, there’s nothing on my mind besides what I say.’ Like Mrs Copperfield’s, Harriet’s isn’t a real voyage out: she thinks of Camp Cataract as a ‘tree house’, a safe place where she can build up habits and roots as she would at home. Sadie is ...”

“... Ussher settled the controversy in 1650 with an authoritative proposal of 4004 BC. This was the field in which Newton hoped to make his last great contribution to human knowledge. He accepted Ussher’s chronology, but wanted to extend it from the Jews to the Gentile nations. Greek and Roman history had never been satisfactorily synchronised with the ...”

“... in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does not have the field to himself. There are at least a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of ...”

“... rapport between actors that animates such classics of the genre as It Happened One Night (Frank Capra was Cassavetes’s favourite director) or The Awful Truth or Bringing Up Baby. Part of the fun of those movies comes from the sense they give that the actors themselves are having fun. An actor having fun with a part, playfully embroidering it, opens ...”

“... of Paul Roazen’s two books about Freud’s less than saintly relations with his followers, or of Frank Sulloway’s exhaustive book about Freud’s reliance on the vulnerable biology and ‘sexology’ of the late 19th century. The more we learn about Freud’s actual grounding in his age, the less possible it will be to sustain the Promethean myth of his ...”

“... In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops. Like other senior military figures, he had criticised the luxurious lifestyle of German officers in Paris: their Etappengeist, the ‘spirit of the rear lines’, was in contrast to the Kampfgeist, or ‘fighting spirit’, of those dying at the front ...”

“... we have identified it as the re-humanising activity, so when it becomes technical or claims a field of its own – when criticism says, ‘Let us be like other departments of knowledge’ – it seems not only to mistake but even to betray its nature. Criticism, in any case, is no longer what it was; and Christopher Norris’s compact book on ...”

“... criticism as well as of forceful recommendation: they take the weight of what there is in the field in order to choose its best representatives. The desiderata of representativeness and intrinsic value serve as checks to each other: the duty of allowing for other tastes balances the power of judgment which an editor enjoys. At any rate New Stories 8 ...”

“... had already succeeded in expanding her M.O.W. into M.O.W.O. Having married her maternal cousin, Frank Oliphant, before she ever laid claim to her work, the novelist managed to efface her maiden name and to emerge in print with her mother’s. Since that mother had a fierce conviction of the aristocratic superiority of her family to her husband’s, doubling ...”

“... ignored the linkage between beliefs about sex and sexual practices. As a result, ‘he leaves the field of bodies and pleasures perfectly intact as a subject of historical enquiry, with its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new ...”

“... because the pleasure produced by the free play of the imagination is intrinsically subversive. As Frank Sinatra puts it, ‘Imagination is silly, it goes around willy-nilly.’ For Steiner, it is the willy-nilliness of imagination that makes it dangerous, and our readiness to indulge that willy-nilliness that makes art matter. Steiner believes, to use an ...”