“... for principle and button-holes’. And it is at Brummell’s well-shod feet that we can lay not only the tradition of dandyism, but the Great Masculine Renunciation itself, the turn away from pomp and ornament and finery which gave us the Savile Row suit. Hollander gives J.C. Flugel’s theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation short shrift. She ...”

“... from the Greek ode becomes a Brobdingnagian monster: ‘The big-limm’ed Babe in his huge Cradle lay.’ This has affinities with the consciously coarse-lined, gigantesque drawings which Giulio Romano did for the Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, but it has little to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir ...”

“... sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously out on the seven hundred pages of L’Etre et le néant. And, fresh from reading Bergson, I find it frustrating that his sociable brevity, and the even more sociable clarity that went with ...”

“... manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, expected to be intimidated and found himself before a ‘principled old maid’: ‘That hairless face, those fine features, that light voice combined with the stiff, fussy manners, presented the almost asexual character I was later to recognise in ...”

“... for a page or so, this arguable but highly contestable assertion – contested in particular by Paul Hamilton – about the main crux in Coleridge’s most important critical work, is never returned to, explained, argued for, and the problems it involves never acknowledged. Equally oddly, Holmes’s account of these definitions, which magically unified the ...”

“... are metaphorical, miracles are publicity, designed to launch a new religion, whose main point lay elsewhere. ‘Jesus is our Saviour,’ let’s leave it at that. Or are you finally one of the countless multitude who don’t consider themselves Christian, but not atheist either, one of those who vaguely sympathise? All that stuff about virgins and ...”

“... of P&S slightly. Now there is room to show greats like Picasso struggle, and less-greats like Paul Signac shine. (The decision to begin with his wild Neo-Impressionist portrait of the debonair critic Félix Fénéon caused much consternation: that’s how fetishised the presentation had become.) One effect is to ease the expectation that every work be ...”

“... handsome, as became clear in the arguments fifty years ago about how much grime to wash off St Paul’s. The contrast on a bright day between the dirty-grey south portico of St George’s, which was cleaned decades ago, and the stark black and white of the untouched south face of the tower suggests that the clear picture one now has of the portico’s ...”

“... on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so ...”

“... up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing’. So much for those excitable fellows with their politics and their attempts to reimagine the world. I’m a devoted admirer of the fiction ...”

“... the means. With the Church’s approval, this new warfare, to be engaged in exclusively by lay persons, became lawful and meritorious. How new is this element of the new history? All historians of crusade operate in the shadow of the German scholar Carl Erdmann, whose great book Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, or The Origin of the Idea of ...”

“... towards the young Jewish state, but made its reservations plain. In an article published in 1958, Paul Ricoeur challenged the claims of André Neher, a fellow contributor to L’Esprit, that the accession of Jews to biblical lands anchored an ‘essence’ of Jewishness. ‘Is this essence you invoke,’ Ricoeur asked Neher, ‘which in your view founds your ...”

“... Marguerite Duras felt that Bardot was positioned at the edge of the civilised world. Beyond it lay ‘the jungle … of amorous amorality’. But she didn’t buy the idea that Bardot was a liberated woman. Bardot the actor and Bardot the phenomenon addressed themselves to men, Duras suspected, and she was in danger of becoming a malleable ‘wax ...”

“... distillation than evacuation: the poet, he says, in the second ‘Lettre du voyant’, written to Paul Demeny in mid-May 1871, must drain ‘all the poisons within him and [keep] only their essences’. The radicalism he had in mind, moreover, was that of the voyou/voyant or wide-boy/seer. He was finished, says Rickword in a briskly undemocratic tone, with ...”

“... out with the hermeneutic bathwater was disabused. Philistinism or superiority, for her, lay in the quality of mind manifested in one’s sensuous reaction. If you couldn’t think – think well, think quickly, think like Sontag – then you didn’t feel. One comes with mixed feelings to the personal journals that Sontag kept diligently but did not ...”