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“... 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 ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Patton were allowed to pursue different – and inharmonious – operational plans. It is by no means as clear as Hamilton suggests that Monty’s own proposals for victory in Sicily provided the best answer – some would argue the exact reverse. What is evident, however, is that Alexander did not attempt to provide any answer at all. Monty’s strictures ...”

“... the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From Warren Beatty back to ruddy David. But why the broads latch on to the one bloke Remains what it has always been, a riddle. Byron though famous was both fat and broke While Casanova was a standing joke, His wig awry, forever on the fiddle. Mozart made Juan warble but so what? In Don Giovanni ...”

“... Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Simon and Schuster, £12.99), David Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the ...”

“... Wills MP has merely been asked to ‘help generate a proper discussion about what being British means in 2001’. Whenever ‘Britishness’, ‘Englishness’ or any other ‘ness’ is to be summed up, you can be sure the clichés will come jogging along close behind. Sure enough, Wills talks of ‘a sense of fair play’, ‘tolerance’ and ...”