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“... tall writing-desk, pacing round his furnished rooms, and checking the rhythm of his sentences by reading them out loud to imaginary audiences. But from time to time he would venture outside for a ‘people bath’, and his small, alert and slightly crooked figure was well known in the streets and theatres of Copenhagen. The philosopher of solitude and ...”

“... theories in Patriarcha, seemed intent on making himself almost literally the father of the nation? Reading this essay I was reminded of Joe Orton’s comments when the Lord Chamberlain blue-pencilled the use of Sir Winston Churchill’s penis in What the Butler Saw, substituting a metonymous cigar. ‘What am I saying?’ Orton protested. ‘That he had a big ...”

“... the Church locked up in original Scripture, in the Veritas Hebraica and the Veritas Graeca. Nobody reading this excellent book needs to go on thinking that Rabelais was a Humanist, not because of his study of the litterae humaniores (the Humanities and the thought which they conveyed in philosophy, law, morals and medicine), but because he liked human ...”

“... by two years.) In places he unnecessarily diminishes his own subject, reflecting in the manner of Peter Laslett that every society contains a degree of conflict, and that occasional expressions of it are a matter of routine. Well, of course, it all depends on what we mean by politics. If, like Hobsbawm, we regard as political only actions which are directed ...”

“... correct. Professor Maynard Smith recounts how when he was a boy, he was introduced to science by reading books written for the lay person by the best practising scientists of the day; and in an essay entitled ‘Understanding science’ he posits two imaginary readers: ‘One is an intelligent but ignorant 16-year-old: myself when young. The other is an ...”

“... the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries – the Europe of Anselm, Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Suger, Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Roger Bacon, Snorri Sturluson, Leonardo Fibonacci, Aquinas and many others ...”

“... over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so difficult, perhaps, for the poet who would be inventing ‘Cathay’. Orientalism was also a Late Victorian vogue, and as Martin points out, the ...”

“... government refused to deal, Herr Scheel accused them of ‘abetting murder’. In 1975, when Peter Lorenz was taken by the Baader Meinhof, Schmidt agreed to every demand. But in that same year, when the Baader gang took the German Ambassador in Stockholm, Schmidt would not deal. He called it the ‘ad hoc’ line. Ms Moorehead has done a highly efficient ...”

“... instanced by Professor Brewer, what rejoinder is possible for a young man who has been reading Marlowe’s plays and perhaps acting in one of them, but has no more than a dim memory of looking into Sartor Resartus when at school? In Surprised by Joy Lewis asserts of his boyhood’s most admired teacher, William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great ...”

“... appear, fosters self-indulgence. Certainly this is a term that came to my mind more than once when reading the works under review. For the novelist, experimentation is both demanding and risky, in that his whole enterprise may go haywire and prove unsaleable. The short-story writer is enabled, whether by subsidisation or merely by the brevity of the form or by ...”

“... she handed him back to the Danish navy. Soon afterwards Hans Jonathan met another enslaved man, Peter Samuel, and together they decided to petition for their freedom. Their ship’s captain, Steen Andersen Bille, who was also a privy councillor, met Prince Frederik, the de facto ruler of Denmark, on their behalf and procured a letter from him that stated ...”

“... old days”’ before gay liberation. But such social critique often masks ressentiment. When Peter Wildeblood, a diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Mail until convicted for offences with two airmen in 1954, testified to the Wolfenden Committee the following year, he based his plea for tolerance on a distinction between his own discreet homosexuality ...”

“... Johnson and Howard don’t consummate or continue their affair. This seems to me a very strange reading, since in spite of the delicate ending the film is all about the violent perturbed happiness that wipes out the very idea of marriage and children: the lovers separate not because they have chosen virtue, but because they are ashamed of behaving badly and ...”

“... shot was an RA portrait-painter called Meredith Frampton, whose father Sir George had designed the Peter Pan monument in Kensington Gardens. She asked him to paint her a tree near it. He obliged, enchanted by the beautiful Canadian, but basically he was a quiet man who lived with his mother, and nothing came of it. Elizabeth was very kind to him, but ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...”