“... he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his and their lives, under a series of ...”

“... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...”

“... whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not like the big brave boasts of war.          GIVE ME GOOD PIGEONS! – A very large number of Great Commoners Built like Nye Bevan or Gambetta. Strong, rather than prettily melodious, clear and confident, this ...”

“... to demonstrate their Americanness – is lost when the book is cited by the Afrocentric theorist Leonard Jeffries or the Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammed as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to malign African-Americans. Here, Rogin is not as forceful as he might be in explaining the ethnic dynamic in the grand Gesamtkunstwerk of American show ...”

“... prevent them from treading on each others’ trains. Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman’s debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour. For outsiders, the Court ladies were targets ...”

“... recent politics to one of the most pleasant of popular literature. But politicians have left their mark on her: at times she appears to share, on the one hand, their belief that the public knows nothing about anything and requires instruction (usually misinformed) of the most simple kind; and, on the other, their curious ignorance about the normal procedures ...”

“... of the Horned Magdalene’ is a black comedy about furious turn-over in an old people’s home. Leonard Deane-King combines Science Fiction and fairy-tale in ‘Good Intentions’ – a story which will appeal to admirers of Spielberg’s E.T. – when Chaz and Len find a friendly Martian in the backyard. Mark Illis’s ...”

“... and were artists (Kit a quasi-artist) who between them embraced virtually all media, leaving a mark on the histories both of fashion and of achievement. Motion’s project is not just to tell the story of passing generations, which he does very readably and well, but necessarily also to describe and evaluate aspects of English culture – revivalist ...”

“... it.’ In fact, the lack of practical utility made Latin all the more attractive, as a pure mark of distinction. It became the ‘chapeau bras’ of high culture, as Benjamin Franklin astutely remarked – the hat that a man of fashion carried under his arm even though his wig made it superfluous. It survived the fall of the Ancien Régime to become the ...”

“... Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts. To mark​ the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too ...”

“... she can write,’ she told her husband, angry that he wouldn’t take care of her the way that Leonard Woolf took care of his wife. ‘That’s one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together.’ Mansfield thought that if only she’d had Woolf’s life (‘her roof over her – her ...”

“... of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of Romanticism.’Mark Evan Bonds describes this modern tendency to hear music as ‘sonic autobiography’ as the ‘Beethoven Syndrome’. Extending the project of an earlier work, Music as Thought (2006), Bonds shows in his acute new book how novel this emphasis was, and how ...”

“... famous poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45), and less familiar works such as Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). He ends with a chapter on Baroque painted ceilings.Celestial ascent at death is an ancient idea. In its earliest known manifestations, it was understood as an exceptional fate reserved for the greatest ...”

“... such as the epithalamia, sexier and less discreet than their ancient models, which served, as Leonard Forster argued long ago, as safety valves for Renaissance Latinists. Their arteries would have snapped like pipestems if they had been confined to writing chaste Petrarchan verse. Only​ in the late 18th century, Leonhardt argues, did elites gradually ...”

“... Malcolm’s word) throughout the intellectual world. He was passionately determined to make his mark as a scientist, and it could be that the most effective way of persuading the world that he’d seen further than any of his rivals, especially those among them, like Adler and Jung, who’d been obliged to pack their bags and leave the Freudian house, was ...”