“... Others are crumbly or empty or both. The editing is lazy. Some articles are followed by potted reading-lists, others not. There is no description of the contributors. Edward Timms writes usefully about Benda and Gottfried Benn. He notes accurately that the Dreyfus Affair lies at the very roots of the relations between intellect and power, between the ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”

“... history. London, and most other modern cities, are texts so glossed and patched that no single reading of any part of them is possible. Spiro Kostof’s The City Shaped deals with elements which impose patterns. The evidence is in the plans, drawings and aerial photographs which are the best illustrations in his book. The pointed stars of old defence ...”

“... crimson-dyed hair, and she had a very strong Scottish accent.’ Her distresses make more poignant reading than Epstein’s critical reverses. At one point she invited his mistress Kathleen round to talk things over. When they were alone ‘she said, “I am going to kill you” ... produced a gun from inside her ankle-length skirt, went on talking and then ...”

“... Roman curia which analyses the impact of the canon law system on the individual through a close reading of six cases spread over the period 1653-1923. Most surprising of all, the general cultural context is not given the attention it needs in order to make the description and the narrative intelligible. Surprising, because the author carried out the ...”

“... application. A constant stream of hardships and discomforts is recorded. The index makes painful reading: ‘Suffers from ague ... apoplectic numbness ... boils ... bowels ... colds ... discouragement ... dizziness ... face ache ... fever ... flea bites ... headaches ... indigestion ... rheumatic inflammation ... the sulks ... toothache ...”

“... one day recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale ...”

“... Rothko married an illustrator, Mell Beistle. He gave her a copy of Kafka’s The Trial; he was reading Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Now in his forties, Rothko had had one-man shows and was written about a little, but no canvas he had completed so far would be recognised as a Rothko by anyone who only knows what he painted in the Fifties. His work was a bit ...”

“... the parties. Each author – a Tory MP, a Labour MP and a Liberal Democrat life peer – is worth reading for a justification of his party that rises above ritual partisan point-scoring. If David Willetts was not already the best-known of the three when the books were commissioned, he certainly is now. Allegedly known as ‘Two Brains’ to his friends (or ...”

“... it. Viewers, who can sit down to study the work close up, are engaged in concentrated looking, reading and thinking. The last time I passed it, there were twenty of them.A similar atmosphere can be felt in the Fluxus room, where again there is a plethora of small objects, books, images, toys and suchlike. My own most concentrated viewing was of Paul ...”

“... as the watchword of policy and the passport to power. There is a lot of myth-making in such a reading of history. This Keegan recognises, though even he occasionally stumbles. He is right to draw attention to the fact that Labour was in power during epic financial crises which have entered the popular consciousness as political disasters, even though the ...”

“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”

“... light on the issue of whether ameliorism worked. Did the experts do any good? Charles Madge and Peter Willmott compare Inner-City Poverty in Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers ...”

“... accurately his chronicler will record his adventures.’) The writer stumbles across characters reading his books, only to be told: ‘It’s no big deal. It’s just a book.’ Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand ...”