“... file, and some forty thousand of them died. Their sufferings were not mythical: nonetheless, one may question the way their particular sacrifice came to dominate the nation’s collective memory of the war (the memories of France and Germany were quite differently constituted). Still very much an insular nation, Britain could not easily comprehend the extent ...”

“... of such ‘cures’, though he does speculate briefly on the various drugs with which Woolf may have been sedated and the symptoms which they might in turn have produced. While he obviously deplores the handling of her case, the focus of Trombley’s outrage is not the treatment of Woolf’s madness but the diagnosis itself. Arguing that the doctors in ...”

“... back to the essay on genres, which in turn sends us out to other poems in the anthology ... There may be other collections of poetry conceived in this way, but I have not come across them; certainly this is a model it would repay any anthologist to study. The embedding of the poetry in its historical and literary context is particularly valuable here, for the ...”

“... the Romans could get to it was subridere, which means ‘to laugh at somebody quietly’. This may be true; or, perhaps, he was just laughing quietly at the Latin master. It is permissible to smile, or laugh quietly, at Wodehouse buffs, British and American. P.G. Wodehouse: An Illustrated Biography is a jolly picture-book compiled by Joseph Connolly, who ...”

“... illustrates this claim by presenting a poignant vision of the blighting effect the belief that we may be the final generation can have on love, marriage and art, as well as on our social and political relations. It is obvious, however, that this explanation cannot account for the overriding importance which he attributes to ensuring the existence of future ...”

“... inclination to follow through the implications of his most important ideas, and partly because he may not always have seen clearly what those implications were. In spite of all that, it remains fairly obvious what Bréal stood for in very general terms, and why it was important in its context. Aarsleff is right to say that Bréal’s sémantique was not just ...”

“... with which, as the Elizabethan prohibition implies, it was often associated. Charlatanry it may have been, but like some other pseudo-sciences it bore solid credentials from antiquity. Pythagoras and Hippocrates had endorsed it as a formal study, and Physiognomonica, the treatise that was most instrumental in conveying ancient thought on the ...”

“... that below a certain threshold of skilled competence a dedication to the artist as amateur may issue only in the slovenly and amateurish, and above such a threshold a dedication to the artist as professional may issue only in the facile and professionalised. But why does it follow that ateliers are the answer, or ...”

“... that their spouses will be in the grip of a powerful obsession which they cannot share and which may drive these spouses to their laboratories even on Christmas morning. The passage reminded me of Odile Crick’s complaints about her husband’s prolonged periods of in explicable broodiness. On the question of racism, Medawar reflects on the remarkable ...”

“... by those who, understandably, don’t care to hang around the Augustan parish-pump.) But then it may be objected that anecdotes sidetrack us from the real life of the drama. It is true that when Michael Kelly tells us in his Reminiscences about Mozart playing billiards or drinking punch, this doesn’t take us any nearer the creative heart of Figaro. But it ...”

“... one of the rich resources of the genre, as have secondary suggestions that the revered ancients may after all have been as ignoble as their modern avatars. What grates in Logue’s version is the nervous overemphasis. Something is being proved by overkill and the fact diverts attention from the poem, old or new, to the jumpy performing tricks of the ...”

“... with systems designed to suit other people. Install a man in an ill-fitting system, and you may witness that discrepancy between the organic and the mechanical which Bergson regarded as the provocation of comedy. Kenner probably got the hint from Wyndham Lewis: if so, it is explicable that his account of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe makes ...”

“... rhythms of which Grainger drew on many times. His preference for short forms and free scoring may be linked to the drawing-room ballad and the ‘vulgar’ instruments of the concert hall: but Josephson forgets to say that he may have exploited this, too, as an alibi to conceal the fact that he never bothered to master ...”

“... is greatly aided if one pretends to oneself that it describes a real wave whose behaviour may often be guessed at without having to solve the equations completely. And it is by no means unusual to hear physicists, in their rare moments of philosophical speculation, referring to ‘the wave-function of the universe’, as though it were a real entity ...”

“... the media horrors is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This is a title we may have laughed at, without reading the book (like Barbara Cartland’s novels), but William Gaddis has read it and seems to hate it, as a form of American humbug. The Recognitions is a book about humbug and hype, using as difficult examples the skilled forgery ...”