“... accused Oscar Wilde’s father of sexual assault; the wife of the Victorian apocalyptic painter John Martin; a figure based on Edward Hopper’s painting Hotel Room; a girl caught up in a sexual abuse case; a woman prisoner. These monologues are all effective for the most part, evoking specific experiences and making their points without stridency: but they ...”

“... replies to the papers in this volume. Of the other contributions those by Simon Blackburn and John McDowell make an opposing pair. McDowell, writing with the preacherly obscurity that has come, regrettably, to characterise his work, offers to defend a new kind of moral naturalism that reaches back to Aristotle. His point seems to be that since the rise of ...”

“... he probably concealed even from himself. What was Lilly good at? For an answer we should consult John Melton, who offered in 1620 ‘a new and true description of astrology: Astrology is an art whereby cozening knaves cheat plain honest men; that teacheth both the theory and practice of close cozenage, a science instructing all the students of it to lie as ...”

“... later circulated about her well-publicised weakness for male attendants like the Scottish gillie, John Brown, the Queen did not always adhere to this message. While Victoria may surely be forgiven for relaxing her grasp on the marble Albert, her refusal to moderate her attentions to Brown suggests that in this respect, anyway, she had not altogether mastered ...”

“... our present Radio 3 ... fears every listener that isn’t listening.’ McIntyre’s successor, John Drummond, a more robust sort of Reithian, resisted populist pressures as much as anything by sheer force of personality, but a real cultural turning-point had by now (1985) been reached. In the prevailing Thatcherite contempt for élites the postwar ...”

“... This is not hard to explain. In studies of traditional contraception and abortion practices, John Riddle has demonstrated how often knowledge of therapeutic agents formerly possessed by the folk memory and by medical practitioners has been lost. Urbanisation obliterates hand-me-down lore. Medicine’s growing claims to scientific status result in ...”

“... lives and who provided a space in which those to come could breathe. Kerouac, Genet, Burroughs and John Coltrane were there before Timothy Leary, Marcuse, Germaine Greer and the Beatles. I remember feeling wretched in the early Sixties that I had been born too late, the Beats had already happened, the parade, the great time had passed before I was old enough ...”

“... lives. She speaks of the London press as ‘evil and morally corrupt’. From Whitbread winner to John Knox in four easy weeks. Even the friendlier Scottish papers were apt to harp on rags-to-riches, overnight success. Commentators should take this truth to heart: no novelist ever has an overnight success. Atkinson has been writing for fifteen years, and it ...”

“... Once upon a time, a distinguished French Department in a well-known British university set a question on Diderot in its Final Examination. Owing to a couple of unfortunate misprints, his name appeared as ‘Piderst’. Understandably, it was not a popular question. But it did attract one answer, from a candidate who discussed the merits of Piderst with enthusiasm, if in rather general terms ...”

“... up at the Spanish port of embarkation, ‘there was a tapping on the glass. We sat very still and John rolled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and salty air and a whiskery face with bright blue eyes.’ This sounds like the authentic memory of a child, and it could have happened anywhere. The adult narrator probably put the salt into the ...”

“... marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic ...”

“... acquired a patina of critical respectability, rather as if Sid James, with time, had turned into John Gielgud. It’s worth saying that whatever the excesses and incoherencies of Coppola’s Dracula, it is the work of an inventive and subtle movie imagination, which the Hammer films were not. Of course, we could disavow Gary Oldman if he weren’t so ...”

“... A subtler, and more economical, exercise in revisionism was performed by the Melbourne historian John Hirst in Convict Society and its Enemies (1983). Hirst studied the early history of New South Wales, intent on understanding how a penal colony had changed into a free society. As he stripped away the anti-transportation campaigners’ caricatures and ...”

“... relationship with Lawrence. The most important of these was the time in 1916 when Katherine and John Middleton Murry were persuaded to take a house next to the Lawrences in north Cornwall. The couples had known each other for some while; Katherine and Murry had been at the Lawrences’ wedding two years earlier. Among the many expressive photographs that ...”

“... disappointingly, to be just a desire to have even more money. Buchan offers a fascinated sketch of John Law, who for five hundred days or so ‘ruled France more completely than its absolute monarchs’. During this period, in the early 18th century, he controlled the country’s foreign trade and its national debt, as well as about half of what is now the ...”