“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 reach for those who need it most urgently, but cannot pay for a lawyer. He and his successors (David Gauke is the fourth justice secretary in three years) failed to resist the cuts that by 2020 will have reduced the Ministry of Justice’s budget by 40 per cent in a decade, and have already caused it to lose many of its senior and most competent civil ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 24 per cent (Ireland). The most thoughtful discussion of poverty is found in the piece on Italy by David Moss and Ernesta Rogers. In the end, all one can conclude with any degree of assurance from this book is that there are still many poor people in Europe – a ‘Fourth World’, as they are called in France, which requires attention. But this is simply not ...”

“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be ...”