“... modern age – such is the view propagated in different guises by the French republican tradition. Robert Darnton’s objective, in this collection of essays, is to disturb the serenity of the dinner party, to bring the historian of ideas or the literary scholar down from the noble summits to the murky depths of Enlightenment. His particular concern is with ...”

“... dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ Burns was a ‘self-fashioner’ who used his poems, prefaces and private letters to project an intensely attractive and social personality, which makes it unsurprising that most people were struck by him in much the same way. Verdicts on the career, on the other hand, tend to ...”

“... is unlikely to impose serious pressure, or to cut off aid: as the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stressed on 31 January, when Mubarak was still clinging to power, ‘it is not up to us to determine when the grievances of the Egyptian people have been met by the Egyptian government’. With their self-contained ...”

“... Putting on again joyously the hateful harness’. That is how Robert Pinget’s diffident and slightly dotty narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness ...”

“... of panoptic logocrats? ‘Who whom?’ is famously a political as well as a linguistic question. Robert Burchfield in his deft and delightful book still hopes that it is possible to be a true liberal (that is, only wishy and not washy), so he says that ‘the formal distinction ... is breaking up but should be maintained where possible.’ (Would it really ...”

“... vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they placed Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not longer, American colleges and universities were ...”

“... The fascination of this theme seems as strong as ever, perhaps affecting our curiosity about Robert Maxwell, as well as our taste for the works of Thubron or Theroux. But today, when jumbo jets deposit increasing numbers of ordinary people in the middle of totally unfamiliar cultures which are now only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start ...”

“... do we make of the evidence? At first acquaintance, Gilbert’s work is painstakingly neutral and self-effacing. The facts, impeccably turned out, form ranks and march along in strict chronological tempo. The author does no more, apparently, than open a window from which we can see the procession go by. But this, of course, is passionate and committed ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our ...”

“... with pioneering the ‘essay’ genre, Montaigne’s Essais, as Rigolot sees them, are a shifty, self-incriminating punishment for transgression: with a ‘Sisyphus-like fate, they are doomed to become a body of endlessly rewritten texts.’ Why so? Because the ‘primal scene’ of the Essais was the death of Etienne De La Boétie, Montaigne’s Hallam. The ...”

“... fate on screen if it had been given a similar crash diet. Ellis’s most successful satire was self-satire: Lunar Park, a postmodern haunted house novel filled with post 9/11 dreads, in-jokes and autobiographical notes, with Jay and Bret themselves futzing around as doofus sidekicks. An uncharacteristically companionable novel from Mr Trendy Sicko, it also ...”

“... to another. The book struck me as tedious, certainly not dirty in any obvious way, and massively self-important. In those unpolitical days of mine, I had no idea what I had really bought: a fruit of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and one of its many subsidiaries. A few years later, when I got my first job at Columbia University in 1963, I met many of ...”

“... Between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th, he argues, ‘social thinkers had encircled the self with wider and wider rings of relations, structures, contexts and institutions. Human beings were born into social norms, it was said. Their life chances were sorted out according to their place in the social structure; their very personalities took shape ...”

“... fans were once legion, and as reverential as mystics or poets. Indeed many were poets, like Robert Bridges, who sang that she had ‘all passion’s splendour’. Writers of all sorts revered her, from the anonymous Late Victorian critic who enthused over the structure of Wuthering Heights to the novelist L.P. Hartley, who doted on her whole oeuvre and ...”