“... and in a higher rhetorical style than is favoured by either. At its best, as in the essays on John Stow and William Camden, the method can produce work that is very vivid. Occasionally, the reader may be left wondering whether the vividness of the writing takes it a little bit further than the words of its source, or, as in the interesting essay on the ...”

“... real Pig Islander’. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... End, and Roth’s uncompleted ‘Trotsky-novel’ The Silent Prophet. The most disappointing is John Hoare, whose version of The Emperor’s Tomb contains awkwardnesses, and a few bad mistakes. Not only sense but rhetorical balance, and Heine-rhythm, are ...”

“... extensive knowledge. When he wants to tell us what a good scholar Housman was, he quotes the late John Carter’s comment on the testimonials supplied by various scholars when Housman was candidate for the Chair of Latin at University College, London. ‘Perhaps only those conversant with the trades-union of Academe,’ wrote Carter, ‘can appreciate to the ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... appeal. Where Sampson wants to make the ‘revolution as bloodless and manageable as possible’, John Saul is primarily concerned with its socialist outcome.* His account deals with familiar instances of repression and resistance, which he tends to romanticise as only foreign sympathisers can. It smacks of condescension when a tenured Toronto academic ...”

“... painters to be Epstein’s advocates. His commercial success depended on a few patrons, above all John Quinn, who bought much of his early carving, and on the demand for portraiture from a group very much more nearly coterminous with the political establishment than his detractors were. Epstein found the attitudes of critics understandable: they were a ...”

“... up in Rochester, Upstate New York (coincidentally the birthplace of another sui generis writer, John Ashbery). Abandoning an early ambition to become a composer, he graduated from Haverford College, and then worked for a year on Wall Street. Attracted by ‘the prosperous-seeming world of books’, he had short stories and ‘quasi-philosophical ...”

“... Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially because of his sturdily rationalist opposition to Foucault, in an exchange on Dutch Television in the early Seventies about the location of political ...”

“... spreadsheet jigsaw, mapping the stories from the Sartre biographies (Annie Cohen-Solal, John Gerassi, Ronald Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The ...”

“... looked like, to those who saw it anticipated all around them. Other essays in the first half (‘John Donne: “Farewell to Love”’ and ‘Jane Austen and the Business of Mothering’) aren’t about death but do explore authors’ writings to elicit patterns of feeling or of the want of feeling. Though none of this is explained in principle, some ...”

“... of his life the only significant intellectual to write to Hobbes, apart from his faithful friend John Aubrey, was the freethinker, and far from respectable, Charles Blount, whose letter is display of learning which – as Blount’s work often does – turns out to have been plagiarised, on this occasion from a manuscript by Henry Stubbe. When they did ...”

“... In the early Eighties, Western governments, notably those of America, Britain and France, were anxious to assess the probable rate of growth and pathways of infection of Aids. They sponsored extensive sex surveys in order to find out, for example, the number of sexual partners an average male had in his lifetime and how many used safe sex. The British survey was carried out by four women, primarily trained in medical statistics, epidemiology and health care ...”

“... death my father must have been talking about and though we saw his casket and cortège and little John John saluting and the widow in her sunglasses, we never saw Kennedy dead, most of us, until years later when pictures of the autopsy were released and we all went off to the movies to see what really happened. In the interim, rumours circulated about ...”