“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... that Cuban identity rests on identification with the United States. For Pérez, becoming Cuban means becoming like an American (he prefers to say ‘North American’, though in Cuban usage an American from the US is less often a norteamericano than a plain americano, as in the revolutionary song that goes: ‘Fidel, Fidel, ¿qué tiene Fidel?/Que los ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... the last years before the war’ – the First War – ‘one of the most magnificent and popular means of satisfying this queer need’ for a displeasure-image ‘was Prussian Germany’. Within ten years of the publication of Musil’s words, Jewry and Germany had furnished the world with displeasure-images of monstrous proportions, exploited to justify the ...”

“... successes. The ‘Welsh windbag’ label, though containing a large grain of truth, is by no means the whole truth. Kinnock has much improved the Party’s policy-making apparatus, streamlined its campaign machine, and made a stab at dragging its image into the second half of the 20th century (hence the red rose in place of the red flag). He worked ...”

“... Ruskin was Britain’s most distinguished aesthete, travelling to Switzerland (on private means) to admire and paint the Alps from a distance. Muir worked in the Sierra (as shepherd, sawyer and fruit farmer), he explored them for many years on end, and the richness of his writing roots deeper into the terrain than any other wilderness writer known to ...”

“... with the revived appeal of smaller, warmer, safer houses in our bleaker, straitened world, means that the terrace is once again sought after as a past that does work, while flats are avoided as a future that does not. A decade ago, Muthesius’s well-disposed, elegantly-written and exquisitely-illustrated evocation of the terrace would have been ...”

“... was also beguiled by the geometrical allure of the Classical mode, he devised with the intellect means to reach ends that were conceived in passion. In an endless succession of buildings, mass and sprightliness, repose and power, solidity and wit, order and playfulness, protean silhouettes and adamantine strength, anchored movement and balanced rhythms are ...”

“... still very much in progress’, they leave us, and him, with two pages of questions about what he means by, and how one could study empirically, his basic conceptions of truth, resistance and power. While Foucault’s critics would take the frequent changes of course as vacillations, Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault’s self-corrections as a healthy sign of ...”

“... of the Oscar Wilde sort?’ The indignant question carefully reproduces one of the few discursive means positively known to have been available in the period for making a claim of gay identity: in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913-14, the title character identifies himself as ‘an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’. In this context, the ...”

“... lay in the effacement of personality: ‘Good prose is like a windowpane.’ Woloch is by no means the first critic to take Orwell’s political writing seriously as art, or to doubt that it ever resembled a windowpane. He has, however, raised the debate to a new level by the originality and scope of his analysis of the books and essays Orwell published ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... rediscovery of his unfinished epic The Civil War, edited by Allan Pritchard in 1973. What pleases David Trotter is the conception of Cowley as a poet of cultural crisis, of the ‘intellectual revolution’ of the 17th century. Three leading ideas help him to take this view. The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here ...”

“... There are three false starts in David Mitchell’s slippery new novel. At the beginning of number9dream the narrator sits in a chaotic Tokyo café staring into an empty coffee cup. Eiji Miyake is a mousy young man who has come to the city to find his father, but he lacks the wherewithal to contact the lawyer who knows his address ...”

“... the social and historical reality of beliefs in truth and norms, and that it lacks the means for criticising social institutions, moral ideals, and historical configurations of the self? In self-defence Deconstructionists could suggest that Foucault himself lacked such means, but more positively they could also ...”