“... that this vicar, on his birthday, ‘used to give us all a lavish dinner at Kettner’s’, one may, without being a great connoisseur of the clergy, think that one begins to have some clue as to the sort of priest he was. It was in this parish that Williams elected to serve his first curacy. Open the book again, however, and one finds: ‘I believe that ...”

“... courtesan, is hauled before a Dutch colonial court, so that her daughter and her wealth may be taken from her. All subtleties of language are reduced to the plain, prurient coarseness of the law-courts and the press. ‘She was not allowed to use Dutch and ordered to use Javanese. She refused and used Malay.’ When the case is resumed, after an ...”

“... the Hughes novel, complains about the travesty Frank Richards made of his character – obese he may have been, obtuse never. There’s the History Prize he won in 1910 to testify to his possession of actual brains in place of the low cunning ascribed to Bunter. It may also be meant to remind us of Aitken’s later ...”

“... Stenton Jones, was a Yorkshireman and that is where his NME Yorkshire fantasy derives from. Bowie may have felt torn between his father and his half-brother, Terry Burns, whom Mr Jones did not much like: he made up another romantic story, alleging that poor Terry was a merchant seaman who had twice sailed round the world. A man’s life is conveniently seen ...”

“... represented the big increase in spending and the crucial stimulus to the economy. Its importance may have been obfuscated because it was part of the Nazi scenario to disguise military projects as work creation in the early years. Yet up to 1935 Reich spending on public works like roads merely compensated for the cuts that local communes had made in their ...”

“... history of modern ideas about man. Foucault II is a ‘microphysicist of power’ who, after May 1968, examined modern techniques of social control. Foucault III undertook a comparative study of the pagan morality of the Greeks and Christian morality, with the aim of clarifying our own moral assumptions. The stage we seem to be reaching now is Foucault ...”

“... have an accurate and full work of reference on almost every aspect of the subject on which they may need information or further referral. This is the second point on which the size of the work is to be defended. But there are other grounds as well. Since the last great war, Australian literature has become a subject of study in universities all over the ...”

“... remarked in this paper, memoirs and confessions are still to some extent separate genres, then it may be said that a conviction of his own good fortune is the distinguishing mark of the memoirist. The memoirs of famous sportsmen, actors and television personalities seem constantly to be saying: ‘Look what a fortunate person I am!’ There are primitive and ...”

“... on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position ...”

“... ideas, habits, material apparatus and professional skills, and the potency of a fact (what we may call its truth or reality), like that of a religious fetish, cannot survive outside its framework. Gods and facts are not autonomous: they are constructed. Not out of thin air, mere words or wishes, but by collectives using materials and instruments in the ...”

“... What distinguishes Perloff’s neo-modernists, as a class, from Yeats or Hollander or Muldoon may have less to do with what her writers put in than with what they appear to leave out: story, persona, scene. Her programme favours what Bernstein calls ‘anti-absorption’: this work will not let you get lost in it, will not let you even pretend that you ...”

“... Mrs Stitch than her preferences in footwear. Herodas’ poem, too, is not quite as simple as it may appear. It does not take a reader long to spot that the same female character, Metro, features in the poem that comes immediately before the one about the shopping trip in Herodas’ collection; in it she admires a friend’s scarlet dildo and is told that it ...”

“... steps to prevent us blowing ourselves up or indulging ourselves to pieces. The free-will thing may have prevented us from growing as wise as we could be, but imagine what the planet would be like without their surreptitious interventions. Aliens have nothing but contempt for us, or they love us. Oddly, they don’t seem to be indifferent to us (how could ...”

“... inductions into the Armoured Corps of the Israeli Defence Forces took place on the mountain. It may seem a strange story to celebrate: a complete military failure, involving massive loss of life as well as death by suicide, which is especially problematic from a Jewish point of view, although as the men killed each other in turn, there was technically only ...”

“... with itself’. The Europe of the years between 1348 and 1418 emerged from the Black Death, which may have killed more than half of the population of the continent, and found a new vibrancy after unthinkable destruction. He hopes this will speak to our contemporary lassitude. The distance of a biblical lifetime between our time and the postwar period ...”