“... them was consistent with Frieda having no ‘reluctance ... to occupy the mothering position’ may not, if judgments are called for, be so easily agreed. My own feeling is that among those who care for these matters (and they are not exclusively censorious male oppressors, as here imagined) there is much less animus against Frieda than Jackson chooses to ...”

“... than Woolf. Her father was a housemaster at Harrow, and her education – highly privileged, as we may now think – was curiously similar to Woolf’s, for it was undertaken, more or less alone, in her father’s library. She was prodigiously literate and seems to have acquired the kind of social assurance that allows the possessor the privileges of candour ...”

“... and rich in colour: after all, the Greeks were not minimalists – nor even, paradoxical as it may sound, Classicists. My argument is this: Apelles was admired for his virtuosity. There is a story of a contest between him and the painter Protogenes, in which the latter drew a line inside a very fine line first drawn by Apelles, which he left as a kind of ...”

“... a list headed by Henrik Ibsen (d.1906) and Leo Tolstoy (d. 1910). August Strindberg died on 14 May; he at least had had the consolation of a ‘People’s Nobel Prize’, awarded at the climax of a public parade through the streets of Stockholm a couple of years earlier. The fate of Benito Perez Galdos was more poignant. Though nominated in 1912 as ...”

“... omitted. Faulkner’s ungrateful and ungracious treatment of his early mentor, Sherwood Anderson, may be charitably interpreted as youthful high jinks (although Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished middle age to young women to come and inspect his valuable etchings (alias the manuscripts of his famous novels) ...”

“... debts to Bentham and Mill, even to Arnold, were largely those of a debater who picks up whatever may usefully be gleaned from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his literary career, had presumed a conflict of Science and Poetry subsequently rewrote ...”

“... to verge on anarchy, with Gorbachev’s reforms in real danger of being overtaken by events. He may control the state, but does the state control society? From the outset people have asked whether Gorbachev and perestroika can succeed. Now the question is whether the USSR itself will survive, and pessimistic, even apocalyptic answers are suddenly in ...”

“... Bloom’s own Romantic project, his bid to dissolve the boundaries between poetry and criticism may seem opportunistic. But it’s also true – or at least an article of Romantic faith – that ambitious writers must create the taste by which they’ll be appreciated. Orwell acutely criticised H. G. Wells for being ‘too sane’ to understand the modern ...”

“... work), was ‘on the brink of a new and potentially more violent revolution’. The 1914 war may initially have postponed such a revolution, but thereafter accelerated it. The idea that tsarist Russia was on the road to a flourishing liberal capitalism, and was diverted only by the war, is a fantasy; as is the post-1991 idealisation of tsarism and its ...”

“... no record of what Stevenson felt as he tested this theory, but given his environmentalist views he may have been dismayed when he saw that the linkage predicted by the eugenicists in fact held. But he also saw an alternative line of argument, which accepted the linkage but trumped the hereditarian explanation with an impeccably environmentalist ...”

“... idea of likening the French Revolution and particularly the Parisian mob to a parricidal monster may have occurred first to Edmund Burke. Already in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw the fomentors of revolutions as sinister magicians, the Parisian municipal army as ‘a species of political monster, which has always ended by ...”

“... final volume of Martin Gilbert’s Life opens with Churchill celebrating the defeat of Germany in May 1945. He was 70 years old and completely exhausted. Two months later, he led his party to a shattering defeat at the general election. A lesser mortal would have taken the opportunity of retiring to the backbenches as an elder statesman. But Churchill fought ...”

“... the ads apart, gives a taste of the kind of journalism which the logic of revenue and distribution may encourage. Such beasts, fat on advertisements, are not pernicious in themselves, but they do threaten their leaner rivals. To buy more printed paper when you have not got through the pile which came on Sunday seems absurd. Expense is not the only factor. Time ...”

“... to cohabit in every sense. Against this background, a passage from ‘What is Love?’ which may seem to be just an unabashed hedonistic plea for temporary liaisons, enlivened by the Blakean term ‘shackles’, takes on an uncomfortably autobiographical and literal colouring. Setting out ‘the principle or definition of love’, he writes: ‘the ...”

“... of “decline” raining over us’ includes those who claim to experience no such thing: ‘there may be some people for whom life-course optimism or pessimism is a solid and relatively unshakeable given, so that they infallibly pick out only those elements of the available discourses that support their chosen worldview.’ The counter-discourse is dependent ...”