“... 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 ...”

“... their struggle against the French. And by this odd mixture of forces, kingship was saved. Charisma may be claimed, but it has to be demonstrated. You may summon spirits, as Hotspur tartly observes to Owen Glendower, but will they come? Rituals and forms of ceremonial etiquette have to be scrupulously observed, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... These explanations in some cases have a good deal of intuitive plausibility. It may well be true that the doctrine of the Invisible Hand ‘assured those who had been brought up with the permanent injunction to serve the public weal, yet somehow found themselves absorbed by money-making activities, that they had by no means betrayed their ...”

“... of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family. It was at this inn, on the evening of 3 May 1591, that the English alchemist, clairvoyant and con-man Edward Kelley was arrested by officers of Emperor Rudolf II. At the time of his arrest Kelley was an internationally famous figure, but thereafter the story grows confused: he disappears from view into ...”

“... A Room of One’s Own fails to make quite clear how truly successful Behn was in her time. She may not have been Judith Shakespeare, but she got play after play on the stage, her poems appeared in diverse publications, and there was a strong demand for her prose fiction. That Pickering and Chatto have chosen to publish Behn’s Works is a sign of her ...”

“... visitors or foreign observers, is likely to be at least and at best partially valid, which may explain why the literature on London is so lush. By the late 18th century, it was the largest city in the world, unique not only in the number of its inhabitants, but also in the range of its functions. Pace Dr Johnson, there was not in London all that life ...”

“... that in the Longman English Poets series is not even in a position to realise that this question may need to be asked. The text has already been standardised by a modernising editor, who evidently assumes that Blakes’s distribution of capitals is idiosyncratic and therefore (?) insignificant. Yet Blake’s idiosyncrasy is in this case consistent and ...”

“... dead. Up to that disconcerting moment the most we are inclined to allow the remote past is that it may linger on as a sanctified revival or a quaint reconstruction. It does not trouble us if we find that some of our dearest religious rites are as old as Babylon – Baptism, for instance. We could easily accept that the Druidic costumes we see at the modern ...”

“... from quacks and the pedlars of false certainty. He has shown that what satisfies our curiosity may not be true. His attacks on Marxism, astrology and psychoanalysis have been widely influential. Many working scientists testify to the effect he has had on the actual practice of their art. And although there is a suspicion of redundancy about the title In ...”

“... from the old ones, which have set themselves, in defence, to expanding their book sections, and may in desperation have to turn their hand to the task of discovering and developing new writers to fill their vacant spaces. It would be good if this were to send up the ratio of books reviewed to books published. But that won’t happen. Most books will remain ...”

“... Defence Yearbook Michael Clarke repeats what everyone knows: although ‘the Army, in particular, may lament the fact that Bosnia – like the Northern Ireland commitment – detracts from the real business of training for a major war, the fact is that the prospect of major war is now very low and the likelihood of more Bosnias is becoming higher.’ The ...”

“... because some people are prodigies in one and mere plodders in the other. But the two activities may depend on certain shared mechanisms. For example, both may rely on a common memory for immediate information, such as the beat of the bar or the numbers to be multiplied. Both may depend ...”