“... Fink among her followers. But the publication of Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures – a book of little-known photographs – is likely to prompt a reappraisal of Model’s legacy (Eakins, £56).Model was born Elise Stern in 1901 in Vienna. Her father was an Austrian Jewish doctor and her mother a French Catholic. She studied under Arnold Schoenberg as a ...”

“... out the 47,000 if they seized the list of those who had applied to see the actress and dancer Maud Allan in a private performance of Wilde’s Salome. Allan and her producer sued and the case was tried at the Old Bailey. Lord Alfred Douglas presented himself in the witness-box for the defence, as an expert on the corrupting ...”

“... tradition. In fact, his defence of the French mind, originally published at the same time as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, is a plea for Culture, not Reason – explicitly, it defines literature in opposition to science, and implicitly, the intellectual in opposition to the academic. Lévy and Finkielkraut’s insistence on the ...”

“... and that even the arrival in power of Nelson Mandela has not disturbed their way of thinking. A little later, van Tonder applauded the Government’s decision to remove the names of Afrikaner Nationalist premiers from all the country’s airports. Johannesburg and Durban airports should never, he said, have been named after Jan Smuts and Louis Botha, both ...”

“... novice of 25. The Conservative chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’ and would be ashamed of what he had done for the rest of his life. In fact it was Profumo’s first battle honour and something he could always be proud of. He showed similar skill and courage in the army. He became a lieutenant-colonel at the age ...”

“... inmates. The same biographer liked to assert the relative tranquillity of his death, but there is little evidence that his last months were anything other than confused and tragic. It’s been said since the early 19th century that Fergusson’s mental degeneration was attributable to syphilis, but his death was undoubtedly accelerated by a serious head ...”

“... certainly questionable. The deference of the current Labour government to business has afforded it little respite from criticism over its workers’ rights bill. Politicians with an eye on post-ministerial careers will want to avoid truly difficult decisions of the kind that inconvenience people who can get hold of your private phone ...”

“... in the small press box at the Sussex ground at Hove, a County match was in progress, but there was little at that point to set the juices racing. ‘I think a cup of coffee is in order,’ I said to Martin Johnson of the Independent and Alan Lee of the Times, ‘and the only place on the ground that serves a proper filtered cup of the stuff is the Hove ...”

“... the Australia v. South Africa Test Match going on just a mile away from all the mayhem and hear Allan Border, the Australian skipper, sadly reflecting that the low gate that day ‘may have been caused by events elsewhere in the city’. Meanwhile, people – everywhere but especially in Natal – have been getting killed by the hundred. I’m involved in ...”

“... than embark on a cacophonous longer project, and the verbal extremes in Dunbar’s work have little parallel in his predecessor. Even so, what Englishness meant to Dunbar – and to those who, early on in Scotland, were familiar with his poetry – is an important issue. A colophon to the 16th-century Maitland Folio manuscript copy of Dunbar’s ‘To ...”

“... and their daughter, Franziska. The narrative, which partly concerns the translation of Edgar Allan Poe, is overlaid with Pagenstecher’s wide-ranging exegesis. Wherever my reading eye touched down on the book’s curiously laid-out pages, a broad central panel of text asymmetrically flanked by commentaries or interpolations, it was delighted and sent ...”

“... to quarrel with. The biological substrate of our patterns of desire is something they have little interest in. Both agree that sex must be delivered from the dead hand of scientific medicine. Scruton demolishes in short order the claims of sociobiology and Kinseyism to provide an adequate account of human sexuality by showing how the very notion of ...”

“... mind its outward energies, which never once appear), maybe the critic could display a little more historical precision, a little more conceptual ambition, and preferably much less auctoritas. In the end Steiner’s essays provide an example of the current trench warfare in institutionalised literary criticism ...”

“... almost obliterate it, but this vignette is of some significance – it is upside down. I feel a little guilty seeing the Lake Taupo for the first time in these surroundings – Jason and I are sitting on a small sofa in the Mount Vernon Room at the Westbury, a few feet from a pool of vomit, left behind by a woman accompanying the Australian Ashes team ...”

“... shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead ...”