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“... Genet, and yet it was precisely the outrageousness of such writing that induced Podhoretz to read Mailer’s first three novels, and then to write his adulatory essay ‘Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision.’ After about 1965, long before their final break in 1979, relations between Podhoretz and Mailer began to fizzle, and for a variety of ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of ...”

“... James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and dancing enforced by their anxious parents, and sometimes tempted to ‘modernise’ their lives, while still seeking God’s guidance ...”

“... judiciously selected and juxtaposed, it changes our knowledge of the subject overnight. But Read’s text is admirable. It provides, among other things, a thoroughly documented exploration of how sculptors were trained, how they organised their studios, divided their labour, attracted attention and, by puffing and jobbery as often as not, secured public ...”

“... reproduction of the Elizabethan attitudes their characters articulate.I admit that when I first read Romeo and Juliet I found Romeo’s image pleasingly glamorous rather than potentially offensive: the bejewelled Ethiope, whether male or female, seemed to be offering an alternative style of beauty with which Juliet’s, and the night’s, might excitingly ...”

“... speak of homology among DNA sequences as easily as among tetrapod fore-limbs) that it is easy to read into Geoffroy’s claims an evolutionary meaning he did not intend. The homologies that he saw, or thought he saw, were as far as he was concerned, placed there by the Creator. It was the age of what would be called Transcendental Anatomy. The Darwinian ...”

“... Front: his emotional repertoire consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read Rupert Brooke near the graves of a major and a private, and muses thus: ‘I cannot help thinking of the two together and of the greater value of the one. What a pity it is that the same little piece of lead takes away as easily a brilliant life and one that ...”

“... study, Far Away and Long Ago,* there is a passage which it is hard to make oneself read. The subject is the gaucho method of slaughtering a cow or bullock. One of the two or three mounted men engaged in the operation would throw his lasso over the horns, and, galloping off, pull the rope taut; a second man would then drop from his horse, and ...”

“... book in rejoinder. It is going to be a long time before a better book of its kind appears than Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The elegance of its style, the easy and effective deployment of historical scholarship, and, above all, the ability to distinguish the central threads of recent debate from the side-issues and to follow ...”

“... of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant – his mother. Sarah Walsh emigrated to the United States from County Kerry in 1936. When she was living ...”

“... to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid fictions that animated DeLillo’s own novels The Names (1982) and Libra (1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 ...”

“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... is, whether it can be other than relative or subjective or something of that sort. (Some, such as Richard Rorty, say that ‘truth’ is not really the object of our inquiries or our concerns at all: what we should aim at is rather something like solidarity.) The first of these impulses of course fuels the second: the demand for honesty and truthfulness turns ...”

“... is acknowledged as some sort of masterpeice, but it is clear that not all who praise have actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted abridgement. Dover’s proper two-volume edition in paperback is a faithful (since facsimile) reproduction of ...”

“... came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, J.K. Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of books on the ...”