“... made a lot of money explaining it to bankers and brokers. He was also the first to develop (and may have been the first to conceive – the history is obscure) a programmable computer. The first major task given the machine was what Julian Bigelow, an engineer who came to work with von Neumann on the project, called ‘a very historic computation’. The ...”

“... translated into French by Perec), Queneau’s Exercises in Style are striking examples of what may be achieved in the mode. Perec joined in 1967 as the group’s youngest member, but one of its most inventive. He excelled in composing bilingual poems, palindromes (his longest is five thousand letters long), exercices d’homosyntaxisme (in which a text ...”

“... developed, students are moving beyond the limitations which they once imposed. These developments may be observed in a variety of areas. Most apparent, I suppose, is the line which Shakespearean textual criticism has been vigorously pursuing for about ten years, and which has resulted in a new approach to the problem of Shakespeare’s texts.* What is most ...”

“... or shouldn’t be in the lifetime of people mentioned in any way disparagingly. If yes, offence may be caused. If no, they’ve lost the chance to answer back. But if they’re famous, oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it ...”

“... condition of mature mental life. Those of us who aren’t quite sure what mature mental life is may bristle at the terminology, but it brings with it a simple model of what the practice of psychoanalysis might entail if these are one’s ambitions. ‘The analyst,’ Lear writes, endorsing Loewald, ‘is more highly organised than the analysand. The ...”

“... sense’. As Havelock Ellis jauntily personifies the process, ‘Sleeping Consciousness we may even imagine as saying to itself in effect: “Here comes our master, Waking Consciousness, who attaches such mighty importance to reason and logic and so forth. Quick! Gather things up, put them in order – any order will do – before he enters to take ...”

“... is a belief in technical feasibility, and this provides one of the volume’s staple concerns. It may not be stretching terms too far to label the interest which in each case is engaged an aesthetic one. In The New German Mentality Marcuse wrote that Nazism ‘mobilises the mythological layer of the human mind, which constituted the vast reservoir of the ...”

“... the law. And, having lived lives generally presumed to have been even shadier than they were, they may well be immortalised as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies ...”

“... say, either to themselves or to the other characters present, and what sorts of thing Shakespeare may not have quite been able to say, whether for reasons of political prudence (of which he had great store) or because it was not quite possible to say them within the mental world in which he operated. In different phases of Shakespeare’s career and in ...”

“... immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their titles suggest, geography is equally crucial to the trade war pitting Longman against Norton. Given the inevitable overlap between their contents, it may be all that allows some ...”

“... unburdening herself to Burgos-Debray. The particular details of her father’s conflicts over land may, as so often in families, have been largely unknown to his children. Her recorded version was a colourful, moving and, on the whole, honest account of what it was like to be an Indian woman in Guatemala during the years of struggle and repression. Yet ...”

“... Sally rather than me. ‘It’s all right,’ she laughed, ‘even Dad didn’t know him.’ ‘He may have baled out,’ Nick said to me. ‘And drowned at sea?’ I asked. I was shocked at how bitter I sounded. He shrugged. ‘Or he may still be down there,’ I said. ‘I can’t think about that,’ Sally said ...”

“... work its real immediacy and appeal is that, regardless of the particular subject about which he may be writing, the present and the past have always come together in his work in such a way that he has been above all else a contemporary historian. To some extent, this is because the Victorian period, which is at the centre of his historical universe, remains ...”

“... who can still, unlike historians, expect to accumulate important new evidence all the time, may play a decisive role in the resolution of the debate. Already, it is archaeologists who have contributed most to the third, economic growth, school of thought, with their dramatic discoveries in the towns and ports of eighth and ninth-century Europe. Now ...”

“... to his argument that theory should be toppled with a discrediting of data. Immodest as this may seem, the procedure underwrites a scientific intention of his own. Mead’s ethnography was not simply a treatise on child development. It entered the ‘biology’ versus ‘culture’ debate on a particular point of method. She herself saw it as testing a ...”