“... to eat pumpkin, or to any fraction of land that will grow pumpkin, however plentiful such land may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled by the real proprietors of said land to do competent work for his living. And who are these ‘real proprietors’? ‘The Saxon British.’ It was ‘heroic White men’ who turned the ‘oozy ...”

“... wore leeks in their hats for childishly naughty revels and received blessings on the lines of ‘May your P & p’ – i.e. Prick & purse – ‘never fail you.’ Offenders against the rules were punished by having their penises smeared with egg yolk and oats and then exposed to the mercy of two hungry ducks. A merchant called Robert Nettleton was awarded ...”

“... not particularly needing anything though within reason able, if you choose, to have it. Money may be Frozen Desire, but when it thaws out Desire may emerge less lively than one had hoped. James Buchan would agree that it isn’t much use talking to economists about these money mysteries, for they will all tell you ...”

“... and engrossing, illuminating some dark corners of 19th-century visual culture. Still, readers may end up feeling less than fully persuaded, and doubtful in particular whether Gotlieb’s arguments justify our writing off the old ‘emancipatory narrative’ that relied (as he puts it) on a ‘seemingly Romantic but in fact vague and hackneyed vocabulary ...”

“... effect on academic libraries in the US. If their research programmes are very ambitious, they may have to divert up to 50 per cent of their acquisitions budget to buying Elsevier’s products. Humanities subjects suffer correspondingly from frozen or reduced budgets, those twin toads of academic life. The argument is that students of the humanities can ...”

“... servants, poor whites and planters looked down on the ‘natives’ and up to the bigwigs. It may be that Duras was raped when she was four; in any case, sex came into her life early on and it was a nasty business, although Adler refrains from any obvious psychoanalytical interpretations. From Cambodia the family moved to Cochin China, surviving on Mme ...”

“... dotted around Macedonia, but you are not allowed to say that during a war like this, where it may be that bad things are being done on both sides, just as you are not allowed to doubt atrocity. It’s as if Nato and its entourage were trying to make up for the witlessness of the past: trying to show that whatever we do, we won’t be turning a blind ...”

“... it used to be. Perhaps more important, it makes it feel safer to collect as an investment – this may be something for which Wilson was responsible. The danger lies in the information available on the work of art’s recent history. At the sale of a single collection the recent history of the objects is perfectly clear, but in other sales it tends to be ...”

“... intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time-segments.’ The novel may be sceptical about the good faith of realist writing, but it’s also nauseated by Wataya’s kind, cultural vampires, the new undead. Maintaining this balancing act doesn’t subdue its exuberance: it has the usual metafictional company – the truanting ...”

“... scandalous and always controversial focus on sexuality and the socially constructed body to what may be an equally controversial concentration on spirituality and biological drives and affects. This is worthwhile because to many involved in literary studies, especially in feminism and queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s career seems to provide not only a ...”

“... now be self-conscious, deliberate dives into the sublime banal. Nowadays a novelist’s characters may themselves be knowingly aware of the effects of place. Swift’s new novel returns to the South-West London of his first two books. It is set in Wimbledon, but ventures, if that is the word, to Putney, to Hammersmith, to Chislehurst, even to Broadstairs. His ...”

“... You hold in your hands the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century. In my 25 years this may be the most magnificent, courageous novel I have ever published. Magnificent because it can only be called a great novel, a tour de force, a novel that truly stands beside the Victorian classics.’ Admirers of Fingersmith might contest these ...”

“... and his stupidity, glimpsing a mind that moves with ‘force’ but not ‘clarity’. Ira may be a courageous idealist, but he is also a thug. As Nathan hears him rant senselessly about the Korean War, and berate his Negro maid for her loyalty to Harry Truman’s Democratic Party, he becomes disgusted, and after a while, ‘profoundly bored’. For ...”

“... Still less were they expected to do them. That such flaunting outrageousness might become a trap may not immediately have been apparent. The conventional media have always celebrated Greer the phenomenon. It saves them from having to weigh and sift her ideas. The coverage of this new book, explicitly billed as a sequel to The Female Eunuch, has been wide and ...”

“... Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé’ consists of nine-line stanzas rhymed ababcdcdD. Shelley may have invented this form, his editors suggest, because he could not yet cope ‘with composing in the more complexly rhymed Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcC)’. Though his imagery tends to be trite, Shelley did pretty well with the rhythm of his invented ...”