“... her by marrying in 1916, Cather remained enthralled by – yet deeply conflicted over – the power of the feminine. While longing all her life for some primal ‘maternal-erotic’ figure to whom to cleave, she also despised her own yearnings, and sought to identify herself, self-protectively, with boys and men. Much of the strange reticence of her ...”

“... entrance. Everyone on the train looked terribly prosperous, clean and peaceful as they read about Jonathan King and the Nias earthquake in the Standard. It is amazing to watch the skill with which three people can stand in a rocking train, in a space less than two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker ...”

“... housing, are another thing. They are low and loud, blades set to maximum volume. An assertion of power. A jolt of paranoia. They have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night ...”

“... Jew, and as one who knows more than most about wartime anti-semitism. He admires the intellectual power of de Man’s late work: ‘the only peculiar thing is that a philosophical mind of this calibre should turn against the pretensions of philosophy and toward literature.’ And now he wonders about the purity of these deconstructive essays. ‘Hegel or ...”

“... his interviews and his complete short stories in five volumes (there is also a selection by Jonathan Lethem in one volume). And in a final sign of respectability, the Library of America – whose enterprise began with Melville and Hawthorne – now offers Dick in two volumes, with more promised soon: the first volume, released in 2007, sold faster by ...”

“... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...”

“... and electrified Africa’. But for the time being they’re ‘a convenient image of African power on the march’. Friendlier observers see Morel’s campaign as a parable, which they interpret in line with their own preoccupations. Elephants, a French columnist notes, resemble the rights of man, ‘those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals ...”

“... regimes many of the rights and protections of the individual against the exercise of collective power appear initially as intuitive boundaries of this type. Freedom of religion, freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, sexual and reproductive freedoms, protections of privacy, prohibitions of torture and cruel punishment are all supported ...”

“... of the time rather than monastic criteria of moral propriety. In the 18th century the connoisseur Jonathan Richardson had believed that ‘an understanding in a science is the possessor’s property which every man sells at as good a rate as he can for value received. Why connoisseurs should be expected to distinguish themselves by their generosity and ...”

“... when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction is merely the belated revenge of those disreputable sophists and perverters of reason whom ...”

“... E.H. Carr, as well as Peter Smollett, who was indeed a Soviet agent, and who had probably advised Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm in 1944.Burgess explains at length that Orwell’s list was not a McCarthyite hit list, since the only harm that might befall those on it would be that they wouldn’t be asked to provide propaganda for the Information ...”

“... he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. In 1841, he was chosen by the Census Commission to find out more ...”

“... against countries that didn’t comply, but this never happened. The WHO has never had the power to compel a reluctant member nation. Its funding and staffing were small – 254 in 1949 – and its competencies both vague and potentially limitless. It had the remit to be the world’s watchman for infectious disease outbreaks, but it also had a ...”

“... day in 1921 was his bid for freedom. Not surprisingly, Pritchett is a frequently quoted witness in Jonathan Rose’s recent book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, in part because he was so eloquent about his sense of being educationally deprived. Like other autodidacts of his time (few of them, including Pritchett, entirely ...”

“... is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to ...”