“... if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was self-obsessed, he was unselfconsciously self-obsessed. The effect he made on the Osbourne family, when they first set eyes on him, is suggestive. It ...”

“... work has been an anxiety that the institutions and practices of the modern democratic state may not be sufficiently firmly anchored in the traditions of German thought and politics. He is convinced that the emancipatory potential of such a state needs to be defended against the powerful current in German philosophy and culture which views democratic ...”

“... illustrators and calligraphers, is set stumbling by the weight of its clothing. The aesthete may be charmed, but readers qua readers look only for puritan neatness. Billboards and headlines catch the eye, but if you want more than a few sentences to be read you had best turn to anaesthetic greyness and deny the eye its desire to find visual amusement in ...”

“... 1,000 miles an hour, nearer a quarter than a third of a mile a second. ‘More than twice’ that may be put at two-thirds. At the latitude of Athens the cruising royalties, as they keep pace with the dawn, go at about 800 miles an hour, almost a quarter of a mile a second. The working fairy goes almost three times as fast as they do, but they can catch up ...”

“... hardly even suited to be Mexican.’ ‘I’ve no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favour?’ But an alarming number of others seem to have stepped straight out of the condescending dreams of D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry, all immemorial wisdom and ethnic patience. They say things ...”

“... therefore, a text quite different from that of a novel or an autobiography, even though they may offer some of the same satisfactions. They are less a Greek urn than a heap of shards. All we know of Hardy, moreover, leads us to suspect that, as with Jane Austen and others, some of the letters we should most like to read are missing. In the final ...”

“... see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t make quite the Cubist point that Gris is ...”

“... did not thus acknowledge the fictionality of its own constructions could never escape falsity. It may be that Vargas Llosa has based The Storyteller entirely on actual experiences of his; that nothing in it lacks its corresponding reality. Yet unlike many autobiographers who report, decades after the event, pages of speech as if verbatim, the narrator ...”

“... perhaps the circumstances in which she wrote it seemed, after the war, too distant; and it may be that it was too closely attached to her private feelings anyway. As many of her critics remark, Barbara Pym’s fiction characteristically takes off from some autobiographical reality: the unexpectedly high incidence of anthropologists, for instance, is to ...”

“... their fathers. It is Estela Welldon’s point in this often sympathetic book that maternal incest may be more pervasive than Freud was able to recognise. Psychoanalysis began, however, with the really very puzzling question of the difference between adults and children: that is, the significance of the link between desire and the capacity for reproduction (a ...”

“... lamented ruin had become confused with an idea of salvation. As a perfect English village, Tyneham may have been destroyed, but at least it had been spared the many degradations of the post-war period. Nobody had widened the roads, fluoridated the water or filled the place with holiday bungalows. There had been no consumerism or television to foster aberrant ...”

“... attitudes have persisted. Confronted in 1989 with the bicentennial of the French Revolution, we may still feel inclined to see that event through the complacent, uncomprehending and too easily condemning eyes of a Sidney Carton or a Scarlet Pimpernel. And this is deeply unfair. Yet traditional British distance from – and distaste for – the French ...”

“... from ‘eager-midfield-runner’ to ‘man-capable-of-magic-moments’. Without that goal, Platt may not have been so lucratively pursued by the Italians. He may not even have lasted in the England team. Graham Taylor, though, was always a Platt fan, and Platt owes a lot to Taylor. One of the most strenuous sections of ...”

“... sovereign that this nation has ever known. Even his sons, who enjoyed a bad press in their day, may have escaped complete derision because they were more involved with charitable associations and voluntary societies than posterity has generally recognised. Predictably, George IV was less generous to others than his father had been, while being much more ...”

“... now in Philadelphia.) The ready-mades, too, are gathered into Duchamp’s private world. They may have signalled a radical displacement of art from the domain of making to mental distancing, but before they became public they existed already as shorthand emblems of frustration or subverted purpose in the artist’s personal vocabulary. They augmented ...”