“... journals produced in Berlin, Prague and Paris. The general effect, however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound ...”

“... myths. This is not at all to deny that in any given situation thinking about quite other subjects may rub off on the arts. Early Modernism is in part a matter of new technology; the designers of dreadnoughts and flying machines had to do new thinking about ships and vehicles, to get away from the notion that a warship was just any old ship with guns on it, an ...”

“... the right course. Thereafter our assumptions grow exponentially. The rule book says that a pilot may not connect his INS to autopilot without a fix on a VHF Omni Range radio beacon (VOR), but we assume that this rule, too, was disregarded. We now further assume that the pilot made a further off-the-cuff decision to disregard even his own self-devised flight ...”

“... betrayal of life and the novelist’s treachery to those who surround him. But prudent readers may prefer not to discover The Counterlife’s intricate surprises in advance. The novel’s main character – need you be told? – is Nathan Zuckerman, whose reputed similarities to Roth himself have already been amply described. I remember my English ...”

“... that those patients were persuaded to accept in the course of their treatment. Such validation may or may not be of interest to the cured patient, but it is vital to analysts themselves in providing evidence that their concepts fit well with psychic reality. Thus the supposedly unmatchable success of the therapy has been ...”

“... English-speaking section of the population, but with the Boers, the Afrikaners. As a group they may have had the reputation, at least among outsiders, of being provincial, unwelcoming, defiantly illiberal and racialistic, isolated from the rest of the world as much by their attitudes and language as by their geographical situation. Indeed, when my two older ...”

“... I was born in London on the 20th of May, 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of The History of British India.’ The father-author thus announced at the beginning of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography dominated his life from early childhood on. Did he in any sense author his son’s life as he authored his books? John Stuart Mill wrote his own Life in large part to work out an answer to that question ...”

“... and Prediction’, that is, in its present form, new. The Uniqueness of the Individual, I may add, was reprinted, with a new introduction, by Dover Books in 1981. As for their themes, we can let the author speak for himself. ‘In so far as the essays collected have a central or recurrent theme, it is in the attempt to answer the following ...”

“... beginning of her relationship with Virginia Woolf. She was talking about her cousin Eddy but it may leave one wondering what subtle category she had in mind for her own and her husband’s behaviour. As a young girl she had two relationships of the kind Mrs Glendinning calls ‘exciting’, one with Rosamund Grosvenor (‘what a funny thing it is to love a ...”

“... that fountain Which pours forth so rich a stream of speech ... O glory and light of other poets! May the long study avail me, and the great love That made me search your volume. You are my master and my author; You alone are he from whom I took The good style that has done me honour. It is fitting that Virgil should see himself clearly, and in the harsh ...”

“... If Margaret Thatcher did not feel the same need to subject herself to this particular rule, it may have been because she never made mistakes or because she flinched from a discipline that was external and alien – in a word, foreign. Lawson brings out her persistent reluctance to deploy the interest rate weapon against inflation, despite the fact that her ...”

“... as Barbara Wright’s otherwise excellent translation has it, ‘I’ve aged’. Zazie may have aged but the idea is more sententious than anything else she says, and she is more likely to mean she has just grown older. Time has passed, as time does. There is nothing you can do about it, and nothing has been done. Of course the perky gaze of the ...”

“... supported the left-wing Salvador Allende. Huneeus wrote to Gould: ‘Our candidate lost, as you may have learnt in one of your few moments of un-provincialness. Bad anti-climax it was. Everyone expecting the bloody country to occupy the news for ages as the one, first, eccentric, out-of-the-way little place that votes in a Marxist government – and we turn ...”

“... in the American academy at a moment when the amateur reader, on the evidence of her own book, may have the feeling that the weeds are taking over the garden. This is a shame, because the points she makes in The Scandal of Pleasure seem not just right, but indisputable: books and pictures are not newspaper leaders and shouldn’t be treated as if they ...”

“... Bembo’s concluding Neoplatonic evocation, in poetic prose, of love’s powers and properties, may seem more embarrassing than engrossing. Women appear regularly but they play strictly regulated roles, organising discussion and playfully slapping down the ill-mannered speakers who try to go too far. As always in societies governed by the chivalric code ...”