“... we are interested in the society lady with the formidable wealth. The reader of Benstock’s book may soon wish to go back to Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). It was Lewis who first told us about Wharton’s affair with Fullerton and who printed the puzzling erotic text of ‘Beatrice Palmato’. Lewis brought before us a creative woman with a ...”

“... in ‘poetry, not poems: poetry, that is, considered not as the body of poems that have been or may be achieved, but as a quality or a condition of language never exemplified without some adulteration in even the greatest poems, seen there only by glimpses, by fits and starts, a fortunate visitation on some one line or snatch of lines’. Davie is beginning ...”

“... to give up on some corporate vision beyond the self-gratifying ego, in which individual existence may be at once fulfilled and transcended. Eliot’s career as a novelist is almost exactly coextensive with the period of high Victorian prosperity in which industrial capitalism is assuming a gradually more corporate form; and one of the many conflicts her work ...”

“... Cherno-with – a woman who holds every kooky belief that drives the militia movement – one may be appalled at the popular support for such people or happy that there are so few of them. The question that everyone wants answered is whether Fascism can return, but it’s not clear what that means. Ultra-nationalism, say, ...”

“... in 1995): ‘Thanks for existing’? The fact that there is a current popular song of that title may give us pause – even if songwriters do sometimes read novels. Whatever she said on this occasion, though, it’s hard to imagine a composer and librettist so roundly failing to rise to it. Over an anodyne Latin beat and to a tune that sounds like ...”

“... first rank. Still, it is handy to distinguish the two lines of development. Turing gave us what may turn out to be, in a sense, the last word on what is computable in a finite number of steps using any procedure whatsoever. At the same time he showed that only four types of step are needed (or fewer). Hence any computation can be achieved by sufficiently ...”

“... receipts pour in, and the governing committee doubles his wages. His wife has feared that Gedge may now be ‘giving away the Show ... by excess’, as before he almost dished them by restraint – but the point, of course, is that no excess can be too much for the vulgar multitude. The only real difference between Gedge’s original position as librarian ...”

“... great deal of harm; and Unger himself acknowledges that any major project of social transformation may well turn out to be massively and brutally unsuccessful in practice. But it certainly does not follow that there is nothing important to be learnt from his urgent and idiosyncratic voice. Like most radical social thinkers (perhaps like all social ...”

“... be seen.’ Along the way, though, Koestler suggests that ‘a man’s longing for the Holy Grail may become so strong that he flies like a moth into the flame; and having burned his wings, crawls back into it again.’ This is the ‘suicide hint’ which so irritated Hillary’s family and friends. (When I was a BBC talks producer in the mid-Sixties, I ...”

“... mending when the authoress was busy writing and dazzling. And the complications of the situation may have held a thrill for Nesbit. Though trendily expressed, Julia Briggs’s account of her subject’s attitude towards her husband rings true: ‘Edith found it impossible to write herself into the script of Bland’s love life without becoming his usual ...”

“... man’ – the learning of the lesson was itself a form of defiance and an aid to survival. I may be an ‘intellectual’ today, even though the word fills me with vague discomfort; I certainly was not one then, because of moral immaturity, ignorance and alienation; and if I became one later on, paradoxically, I owe that precisely to the Lager ...”

“... of in a dramatic way. To the end of his days, he had no idea who his father was. Erikson’s name may now ring a bell for very few people, and even they may be surprised to realise that he died only a few years ago. He had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... Pillar in 1948. Vidal’s sly mockery of Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s leading book reviewer, may have goaded them into arthritic action. Yet the grumpy reaction to this book is partly – largely? – Vidal’s own fault. He has generated a Gore Glut which even the most skilful wave of Kaplan’s wand could not have whisked away. With the deft, evocative ...”

“... with an average age of 24, were on board the Windrush when it sailed for England on Empire Day in May 1948. They paid £28 10s. each – the not inconsiderable equivalent of three cows – and were armed with affidavits signed by Justices of the Peace which testified to their good character. There were also eight stowaways on board. In addition to an ...”