“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... purring, sighing, winking. Hope’s account of Titian’s painting is upsetting chiefly because it may be taken to suggest an affinity between a painting by an old master and such vulgar imagery. Hope’s account is also upsetting, however, because many art-historians prefer art not to be too easy to enjoy or to understand. Works of art which move us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... did in 1899, that ‘there is no elementary manual of English manufacture by which a student may learn to pass an examination in sociology with the least possible trouble,’ we might as well relax: the extravagant ambition has gone, the subject is domesticated, and its adherents may safely graze. There is nevertheless ...”

“... reporting of events, had to be interpreted now as artistic genres concealing vested interests. In May 1916, in the middle of the war, it was still not clear to Kraus what play of Shakespeare’s was actually being performed. By October 1918 he was clear that it was Hamlet. A certain vigilance was required, Kraus began to realise, to deal with the ...”

“... as the accepted leader of a new republic; and his actions during the famous événements of May 1968. In all these areas historians are obliged to take an interest in the personal element. However strong the pull of events, a great deal of importance has to be attached to de Gaulle’s own intentions. It has long been assumed that one of the reasons why ...”

“... is now published here on another page. However, a biography which elicits that sort of response may always be doing so because it is particularly penetrating. I find this biography difficult to assess fairly because of the irritation it provokes both through its crass handling of the English language and through its snide attitude towards the supporting ...”

“... Transitional National Council was well prepared. But insofar as the leaders mattered at all, it may be less for what they did than for what they didn’t do. Gaddafi’s state was not Saddam’s. He didn’t inherit, or rely on, a powerful pre-existing Baath Party apparatus. Or drag his people through an eight-year total war. He tortured and killed, but his ...”

“... locked in the arms of the lover he is supposedly fleeing. The artist who painted those images may have been terrified of lust, but he was also entranced by it. By the time he painted Phyllis and Demophoön in 1870, Burne-Jones had been married for ten years and was reluctantly attempting to disentangle himself from the striking woman who had been the ...”

“... given rise to a multibillion-pound industry to which nobody pays any attention, an industry we may as well call the nonproliferation complex. It comprises a loose conglomeration of academic programmes, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations and government departments, all formally dedicated to the reduction of nuclear danger. Its twin goals are to stop ...”