“... for the elegant simplicity of predictable replication as encoded by rigorous science, historians may wish to settle for the subtle complexity of real life as captured by a more plastic art. This may seem a heavy-handed way of saying that McNeill’s book is so satisfying because it implicitly addresses two different ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no further use for the poem itself: indeterminacy thus insures a poem against prompt expiry and may even keep it enduringly fresh. Furthermore, if a poem can be paraphrased, it will fail to reflect the radically ‘meaningless’, indeterminate nature of our experience. Derek Walcott’s poems, informed and invigorated as many them are by a coherent ...”

“... it is never so. History modifies literature, but literature, equally, modifies history. One may smoke here the different formalism of the Structuralists, who have had some success in tacitly reversing Marx’s materialist project (he thought he had transformed Hegel’s idealist dialectic by introducing material praxis; the Structuralists re-idealise ...”

“... of constant mental excitement and wonder. He is awestruck by the thought of how a single place may have been the scene of numberless events through time, how a space defined by fixed co-ordinates may be occupied and re-occupied, each occupation leaving a residue of change, residue falling on residue to form a ...”

“... to be found the descriptions of the actual processes’ by which we die. This is fine, and others may have got it wrong, but in his grounds for denying the authority of experience to others Dr Nuland, too, is mistaken. Before our century there would have been no adult who had not seen – literally seen – some of his or her children, friends and, of ...”

“... prospects? The future, after all, is the place where our prejudices might not work. Psychoanalysis may begin with Freud but what it is about does not. Malcom Bowie and Christopher Bollas have been writing some of the most innovatory psychoanalytic theory of the last few years but out of significantly different traditions. There is an unusual stylishness in ...”

“... in imaginative sympathy Clark’s account of Manet’s Exposition Universelle de 1867: The sketch may be improbably big and overfull of matter, but it pretends all the same to be not quite a picture, not quite finished. The paint is put on in discriminate, sparse patches which show off their abbreviation – puffs of smoke eat into the dome of Les ...”

“... against the view that the appeal of ideologies ought to be explained in economic terms. It may be that both believe that there is no general argument to be had, and that the most one can do is drive Marxists and Whigs out of one position at a time. But both are faced with the awkward question whether the intellectual constructions they attend to ...”

“... was for democratic socialism, died long before Orwell the man did – died, perhaps, during those May days in Barcelona in 1937, when the Communist boot had stamped so ruthlessly on its own comrades. It wasn’t that Orwell became reactionary, as some of his Left critics said: one can’t imagine him voting for Mrs Thatcher, or supporting her immigration ...”

“... and juster in that it put the general good before self and loved ones – though this last precept may have borne hard on their children. Holcroft’s 16-year-old son and Godwin’s 22-year-old stepdaughter Fanny Imlay both committed suicide after running away from home. Godwin made his own daughter Mary Shelley wretched with his exhortations after the deaths ...”

“... rates; and if you don’t discharge her to a tittle of your agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live ... Credit is too wary, too coy a lady to stay with any people upon mean conditions; if you will entertain this virgin, you must act upon the nice principles of honour and without any respect to parties – if this is not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The writer of a lengthy and documented biography expects to be relied upon as an authority. It may be a work of beauty that he is creating, but that is not all that is required of it: there is also an implied contract with the reader that he shall inform truly, as there is with an architect that his building shall not fall down. Thus an awkward hitch or ...”

“... 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 ...”