“... much like a blurb for her book. To be postcritical, she tells us, is to ask new questions when we read and to answer them in a new vocabulary. The impulse to do so comes from dissatisfaction with two dominant readerly positions: ‘the furrowed brow of the scholar deciphering an intractable subtext and the blissful mien of the subway rider devouring a ...”

“... pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at King’s College, Cambridge, or in his last years, as provost of Eton. It may seem heartless or unsporting to deconstruct these little tales, for the author made no very exalted claim for ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... is the biographer to make of this? ‘In December of 1819 he began to keep a list of books he had read.’ Very convenient for Richardson, but a mixed blessing for his readers, since great blocks of his book consist of these reading lists. ‘He was reading ... he loyally read ... he was reading in all directions ... he ...”

“... reckon, started with Descartes. By contrast, the Recent era started when philosophy, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, took the ‘linguistic turn’. So it started with Frege or Russell, or early Wittgenstein, or the Vienna Circle; take your pick. Modern philosophy was mostly about epistemology: it wanted to understand what makes knowledge ...”

“... of the DNB in its early years had a particular predilection for biographers, but they did not read the signs of the times so well as to believe that the careers of women, perhaps especially of feminists, would be of interest to future generations. Mary Hays was excluded, along with her feminist contemporaries, Mary Ann Radcliffe, author of the polemical ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... level there is much in late Degas that cannot be explained by age and eyesight. On these matters Richard Kendall’s excellent catalogue of Degas beyond Impressionism is highly instructive, and informative and unintrusive in its judgments. It tests your instincts and answers questions without invading the space between you and the pictures. Some questions ...”

“... by the massive 1988 exhibition of Degas’s work, and by the publication in the same year of Richard Thompson’s magisterial primer, Degas: The Nudes. Feminist art criticism, in particular, has added richness and edge to debates about the relationship between form and meaning. That relationship is the focus of Anthea Callen’s study of the ...”

“... three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative fragmentation, moving rapidly back and ...”

“... him keep appearing: literary and philosophical essays by Jean-Claude Milner (2003), Jean-Pierre Richard (2006) and Eric Marty (2006), a gossipy biography of his last years by Hervé Algalarrondo (2006), a chapter about his piano-playing by François Noudelmann (2008). And now we have two new/old texts by Barthes himself, transcriptions of his notes on the ...”

“... him in Berlin and admitted that he was very much a product of that culture. He cited lyrics from a Richard Tauber song from Lehár’s Land of Smiles that had remained with him all these years – ‘Always smiling and always cheerful’ – and implied that this was part of his own persona too. His new book is much like that. The darker side of Modernism is ...”

“... of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy ...”

“... first published piece of fiction was a long short story, ‘The Farcical History of Richard Greenow’ (collected as the first story in Limbo, 1920). It opens with the Greenow children being showered with presents by their rich Aunt Loo – a woman with an immense bosom and high ideals. These gifts will eventually, in mysterious ways, poison the ...”

“... Senators, is a cheap clothing store and a neon sign winking ‘Crazy Eddy’s’. London, 4 March. Read Winnie the Pooh to an audience of children at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Many have never been in a theatre before. I battle against the crying of babies and the shouts of toddlers and end up screaming and shouting myself. It is Winnie the Pooh as ...”