“... a new world: it answers some questions that have hitherto been asked in vain and others which we may not have thought of asking at all. What sort of people collected paintings in the 19th century? How far did they specialise, or were their tastes catholic? What were their motives? Did they buy from artists or dealers, or did they commission works to their ...”

“... and Thomas make too few connections between the early successes and the later failures, and may thus have allowed the pendulum to swing too far back. The revisionist case for the Eisenhower presidency has revolved around two related but not identical claims. One is an argument most forcefully presented in (but not original to) Fred Greenstein’s 1982 ...”

“... intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to poetry, the representative and the didactic are hard to tell apart. These two anthologies, eclectic, open-minded books, covering the same period if not always the same ground, appeared from big publishers within a month of each other. Each ...”

“... Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to set the Sitwells to one ...”

“... of the Front National is the most obvious political consequence of this social dislocation. It may at times be able to ‘clean up’ its message, especially when offering its support to the mainstream Right, but the FN remains a racist party, its intellectual leadership now provided by Bruno Megret, the intelligent and articulate potential successor to ...”

“... But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan. We see him sitting by the camera on the set of Rear Window, looking ...”

“... something else again’ in the course of his alphabet-surfing. The fairy realm of the féth fíada may not only be contiguous to ours but ‘contaygious’ too (the book’s fourth section takes its title from a ballad beginning ‘In Egypt’s land, contaygious to the Nile’). Where Auden has given us the Lords of Limit, Muldoon gives us Lords of ...”

“... natural order rather than a debatable preference, he skips away from honest debate. Of course, he may be right. His opponents may be the unwitting occupants of Trotsky’s dustbin, wasting their lives on dreams as impossible as restoring the Bourbons. The seriousness with which he deserves to be treated ...”

“... survey, and what they survey is the speaker of the main text. But they also suggest that Thady’s may be the better method – the fairy lore, it turns out, has a shrewdly pragmatic set of functions hidden within its rituals. Edgeworth remarks in one note that fairy-mounds often had riches of one kind or another concealed in them and the stories forbidding ...”

“... in need of the other for finance and security. From a metropolitan point of view, the Civil War may be simplistically explained as the moment when these tectonic plates first met and ground together. The City of London, then as now inward-looking except when under any threat to its existence, had no wish to expand its walls or boundaries – a peculiarity ...”

“... writers is more remarkable than what happens to the rest of mankind, merely that through them we may see ordinary events more vividly because we have glimpses of how they appeared to minds exceptionally lucid or devious, and can measure how little separates such minds from our own, when it comes to the ordinary business of living. The historical periods of ...”

“... forty recent poems and prose-poems, and ends with the title-poem, a long meditation which readers may want to compare with Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in an Convex Mirror’ and ‘Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid” ’. The origin of ‘A Wave’ may be the passage about dreams in ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘They seemed ...”

“... as the novel brings us into contact with the pressures of a particular predicament, moreover, we may feel ourselves liberated from the generalising entrapments of ‘freedom’ into a consciousness of urgent special dilemmas from which catchwords can bring no real release. The freedom of the imagination is not necessarily greatest in imagining freedom: or ...”

“... figures contains all the individual cases indiscriminately, the individual circumstances which may have had a share in the production of the phenomenon are neutralised and, consequently, do not contribute to its determination. The average, then, expresses a certain state of the group mind. The same excerpt in the new translation: But statistics affords ...”

“... surrenders his typewriter keys to another person, an immigrant child who, like himself, may conceivably grow up to be the ‘writer in the family’. Other examples of this convention would be easy to find. Where earlier centuries preferred the modes of tragic or comic finality – ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’ or ‘And they all lived happily ...”