“... besides being one of the most influential, novels of this century. Mr Hamilton simply takes it as read. All that he tells us is that it was originally written in German, that it was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, an English sculptress who was living with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in ...”

“... the attendants and guards, some of whom had been at the chapel for a decade or more, and he also read through the old visitors’ books the chapel has kept since it was dedicated in 1972, which include more than five thousand entries. As one might expect, the comments he first noticed chimed with his own experience of being unmoved by the paintings, but soon ...”

“... from her notebook and pinning them to the beach with pebbles. It’s offered, and has duly been read, as a visual metaphor for an unspeakable loss – one of those moments when cinema aspires to the poetic. The film is full of such images: the blast of a Tube train and the mêlée of the platform stand in for Iris’s linguistic disorientation, her face ...”

“... are analyses, rather than expressions, of appetite. Picasso’s pictures showing artist and model read as memories or prefigurations of sex, whence their extraordinary energy. Matisse’s pursuit of the sources of visual pleasure seems, despite the simple subject-matter, to be monitored (if not exactly driven) by thoughts about shapes and colours, as well as ...”

“... the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and ...”

“... even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well aware that it was Caravaggio’s detractors – and chiefly the great theorist and critic Bellori – who associated the dark, dirt and violence of his character and deeds with the subjects and style of his paintings, but Robb’s book provides ...”

“... from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the period, I naively assumed that the food the Bennetts had eaten at Halliday Place was much the same as the food everyone ate in the war, regardless of social status. So I was still capable of being shocked in my twenties when I ...”

“... until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite ...”

“... Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... historical context. She has done well to bring Katherine Wilmot back into print. This lively, well-read, intelligent Irish girl was equipped with the qualities of a good traveller: gusto, curiosity, tolerance, endurance, good humour – and an ability to laugh at herself. She is wonderfully free of fashionable attitudes, trusts to her own impressions and ...”

“... joyless austerity or as the embodiment of fair-dealing and social equity. On these grounds alone Peter Clarke’s biography is welcome. His is not the first biography of Cripps. Patricia Strauss wrote one in 1942; but it just missed its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the ...”

“... staff with people schooled in Reichian practice. Neill rejected both suggestions, but continued to read out Reich’s books at staff meetings. Reich and Neill shared a belief in the redemptive power of unconstricted development in children. For Reich this had an urgent political significance: he thought that only when children were raised free from sexual ...”

“... refuted and denounced them. Only in the present generation have historians like Robert Mandrou and Peter Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from 1532 to 1599 or ...”