“... How salutary to feel guilty about enjoying paintings of the English landscape and peasantry. One aim of Dr Barrell’s book is to animate out suspicions about the difference between the actuality of rural life in the later 18th century and the Romantic era and the image that we derive from various pictorial and literary sources. The work of E.P. Thompson is invoked to remind us that the labourers in the fields were often impoverished, exploited and degraded ...”

“... Anna G. presents herself to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1919 suffering from severe breast and ovary pains, diagnosed as hysterical in origin. We are to suppose that her case not only helped Freud with Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his theory of the death instinct, but that he intended his paper on the case, along with the patient’s pornographic writings, to be published in honour of the Goethe centenary in 1932 ...”

“... and blow up an army fort 80 miles inside Yemeni territory). It is hard to forget 16-year-old John Boyle, the Catholic boy shot in error in an overgrown graveyard in County Antrim; it is also hard to admire as much as Geraghty does men whose reflexes are honed for action ‘as if they were tennis stars being groomed for the men’s final at ...”

“... Beaverbrook his ‘second father’ seems bold. It depends on one’s philosophy about fathers. John McGrath’s first play was called A Man Has Two Fathers – based on the idea that a man with a worthy, authoritative father must find a roguish, wastrel father as well. There is a book by Tangye Lean called The Napoleonists – about the kind of man ...”

“... we know from The Canterbury Tales) and submission to ‘the authority of the circumstance’ which John Bayley has ascribed to the pastoral mode in literature. But not the peculiarly Indian circumstance, for these characters and their situations, no matter how carefully located in Malgudi, have an innate tendency to turn themselves into universal ...”

“... hermetic as anything Lacan himself has ever achieved. This is evidently Safouan’s usual style. John Forrester’s essay quotes the following passage (which originally appeared in a supposedly popular exposition of psychoanalytic structuralism) as representing ‘a most interesting note’: ‘What distinguishes Lacanian theory is that, in showing the ...”

“... were, in art and life, part of Capa’s style. Whelan demythologises Capa without being sour. John Hersey wrote that ‘despite all his inventions and postures Capa has somewhere at his centre a reality. This is his talent’ – and described that talent as you might an actor’s or a gambler’s. Perhaps the wars he covered encouraged that kind of ...”

“... Dynasty range was opened at Blooming-dale’s, 26,000 women stormed the New York store. The actor John Forsythe, who plays the Creon-like Blake Carrington, was beaten over the head at Atlanta airport by a woman who abused him for daring to treat his lovely wife so badly. More disturbing still is the way real life has been vacuumed into the fantasy. In Dynasty ...”

“... Cornwell (she whose ‘bum’ was recently the subject of a libel action) is the model for John le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl and ‘the daughter of a fraudulent businessman’, or even that Dorothy Brett did on two occasions go to bed with D.H. Lawrence only to be told (twice): ‘It’s no good. Your pubes are wrong.’And so it burbles on, for ...”

“... to that honour, consequence and independence, which European laws studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme libre could be woman.’ On the other hand, some scholars (few of whom ...”

“... traditional community of young Polish Jews. The last chapter, set just before a picture of Pope John Paul II praying at the Heroes of the Ghetto Monument in Warsaw, carries an interview with Szymon Datner PhD, vice-president of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the author of 15 books on German crimes in Poland and the fate of the Jews. He calls ...”

“... ability to see faces enables us to see faces in all sorts of things: this is catalogued in John Michell’s Simulacra (1979), which has 196 illustrations of faces in trees, stones, vegetables and animals. In a visual pun, seeing things in things is incorporated with the game that we play, as we sit at our desks, of lining things up, making that ...”

“... certainly felt it necessary to keep on good terms with him. In the volumes under review the young John Constable makes several appearances. Farington gave him good advice about not taking a dead-end job as a drawing-master. Constable took this advice, but mercifully paid less attention when Farington suggested how he should develop as an artist: ‘I talked ...”

“... public and (most important) private life as something which leaves Francis of Assisi looking like John Aspinall. And, lest theologians rush to their nibs to remind me that there are no Quaker saints, let me quote one of those crystalline and unequivocal phrases that all who have read the martyr’s own tapes have imperishably committed to memory: ‘Look, I ...”

“... of discrimination and exclusion was alien to his sensibility, and he continually chafed at it. ‘John Donne Arriving in Heaven’ (1911) sees four people ‘praying in different directions’. When Heaven is all around, there is no single direction in which to turn, no focal point on which to concentrate. If a world resides in one grain of sand it must also ...”