“... dialect’ that each artist makes his own. On Dickens, on Joyce, on Elizabeth Bishop and John Betjeman – perhaps the best essays – he has things to say both brilliant and new. But he wouldn’t have said them, paradoxically, had he not been a critic capable of mistakes. In all his essays he brings virtues easy to class as ‘journalistic’ up to ...”

“... but the tone suggests that a scroll has been discovered revealing that it was actually St John the Baptist who fed the five thousand and that future versions of the Bible would be revised accordingly. There was, of course, no call for Chatto and Windus to proffer any evaluation in a letter of that kind but Margaret Forster could in her book have ...”

“... its mass media, sometimes at the expense of its idea of nationality. On the eve of World War Two, John Reith believed passionately in radio broadcasting as an extension of national culture, but was outmanoeuvred by the audience’s delight in ‘knob-twiddling’. By 1935, there were 7.4 million radio licences in the United Kingdom, but not all radios were ...”

“... his dubiously broad sense) has been uprooted. All we are told is that Wittgenstein (along with John Dewey) illustrates the way ‘philosophical reflection which is completely honest can unsettle our prejudices and our pet convictions and our blind spots without flashy claims to deconstruct truth itself or the world itself’. Surely he is a lot more ...”

“... the destruction of privacy are different. The theme of impossibility is what gives her novel, as John Updike suggested recently in the New Yorker, its lovely echo of La Princesse de Clèves. But in the movie the impossibility is all there is. These people love their abstinence more than they love each other, and she loves it even more than he does. It’s a ...”

“... and to adopt the faith which was its inspiration. Would it be unjust to detect a hint here of John Roberts’s argument that, because the Third World generally chooses to wear Western suits and fire Western guns, we need not regret the price that they paid for European colonialism? Bartlett does note that the 20th century has incurred some of the costs of ...”

“... of pounds’ worth of construction work on order from one of Britain’s top builders, Sunley. John MacArthur, a senior director of Kleinwort Benson, told millions of people watching Channel Four’s Business Programme that the Fayeds’ business empire was worth ‘seven billion dollars’. Now, everyone knows that many of the Fayeds’ claims were ...”

“... the mis-spellings and pointed out that ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’ was not uttered by one John Rowlands Stanley. A full-page picture shows Edward, Prince of Wales, at a sporting event with his jacket buttoned the wrong way, the photograph having been reversed; another full-page picture of a French singer has suffered the same treatment. Thus do the ...”

“... short by the Greek Civil War, she came back to London and more of the same, except that now rich John Sutro was her principal beau, with Connolly in hot pursuit. Predictably what clinched it for Connolly was a holiday she spent in Geneva with Sutro. The wedding took place, ‘after a year’s talk of marriage’, on 5 October 1950. They quarrelled on their ...”

“... victims of what Outram diagnoses as the failure to transcend homo clausus. The liberal speculator, John Stuart Mill, asked himself if he’d be happy were all his projects to be fulfilled, answered no, and fell into suicidal despair. Substitute mammon for his mission, and Mill’s tale can be repeated for Messrs Merdle and Melmotte, the classic overreaching ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... Many observers of race relations in Britain have felt that this country’s postwar experience has been quite distinctive when compared with that of other countries in Western Europe. There has, however, been less agreement about what it is that marks Britain out. One approach has been to draw analogies with the economic situation of immigrant workers in France or the Federal Republic of Germany: this approach has emphasised variations in economic integration and pointed to the different sectors of the labour market to which these groups of workers were drawn ...”

“... comedie’. In similar fashion he began his earlier Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrell (another exorcist, but a Protestant one this time) with the invocation: ‘open the curtaine, and see their Puppettes play.’ Harsnett’s point is that a ritual which seems to manifest supernatural power is no more than a play. Greenblatt’s ...”

“... pages of rebuttal only this time under Burt’s name. The second example dates from 1963, when John McLeish’s book The Science of Behaviour charged (almost a decade before Kamin) that Burt had inadequately described his twin studies, and called his research methodology ‘shocking’. Burt promptly ran a scathing and nitpicking review, three times longer ...”