“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”

“... encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it. ‘Adèle has been ...”

“... Giscard d’Estaing is centre right and seeks to appear as if he were centre left. Foot is too nice, so much so that he is the nicest prime minister we will never have, but Healey is not nice enough and his past bullying of the unions has lost him their enthusiasm if not their support. Foot is romantic, Healey ...”

“... grey and grainy, washed out in places, but then the stock must be very old, and there are some nice splashes of colour, especially the reds and indigos. These are unmistakably moving (and talking) pictures, presumably long buried in some tomb whose discovery might have saved the Lumière brothers quite a bit of trouble. In a ruined church somewhere near ...”

“... to his cost, was not his strong suit. Hamilton’s obituarists were not timid in their assessment: Richard Dawkins called him ‘a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin’. His most important contribution was a Darwinian explanation of altruism, a problem over which Darwin himself admitted to having had sleepless ...”

“... It would be nice to know what to believe. In many areas of opinion, though psychology is a particularly good example, it is easy for an idea to be attractive, sometimes almost irresistibly so, without there being much reason for thinking that it is true. If epistemology existed – a science of evidence – it would sort these things out for us, and tell us when the evidence really backs up our inclinations ...”

“... had a motto emblazoned on her sofa-cushion in Georgetown: ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say about anybody, come and sit by me.’) A clutch of Supreme Court Justices, political bosses and Civil War generals completes the roll. And all this seems fitting for Vidal: radical candidate in a California Senate race, collector and generator of ...”

“... Emerson, more or less proposes this connection between poetry and pragmatism, but it was left to Richard Rorty to argue for it in a passionate and sustained manner, as he does in essays printed in these pages in 1986 and, somewhat revised, in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. The style of Pragmatism is in itself sufficiently poetic to have made many ...”

“... self-pampering.’ Whatever the reason for their failure, the history of the Cambridge baths is a nice case of the ambivalence of the modern world’s engagement with the ancient. It shows the combination of enthusiasm and lack of interest, learned reconstruction and total miscomprehension that underpins most attempts at the revival of antiquity. In ...”

“... Trolls​ are the self-styled pranksters of the internet, a subculture of wind-up merchants who will say anything they can to provoke unwary victims, then delight in the outrage that follows. When Mitchell Henderson, a 12-year-old boy from Minnesota, killed himself in 2006, trolls descended on his MySpace page, where his friends and relatives were posting tributes ...”

“... good times ahead: a youthful President, a skilful housewife (moist cake was the ultimate test), a nice car. A hint of a rainbow even connects the pieces of the paradise.Yet not all is well. Kennedy appears flushed (a blood red also appears in the ground of the painting and in the hub of the car), and the female fingers protrude, grotesquely, out of his ...”

“... by the loos plaintively reads: MIAMI, 4378 MILES —>.) The ethnography of Hooters culture by ‘Richard Baldwin’ – one of the collaborators’ pseudonyms, actually the borrowed name of one of their friends, a 71-year-old former champion bodybuilder and emeritus professor of the humanities at Gulf Coast State College – is full of quiet, plausible ...”

“... out of my hands and slides to the floor, in the process tearing a piece out of my leg. Wendy, the nice nurse at the practice, tells me I should try and keep the dressing dry. The result is that when in the evening I have my bath I look not unlike Marat, except that whereas Marat has his arm hanging over the side of the bath, I have my leg. 14 March. Every day ...”

“... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...”

“... The sun shines bright on the homely Victorine film studios in Nice. Meet Pamela is poised to go. Director Ferrand, however, is case-hardened; he knows that, on even such a straightforward programme-filler as this, compromise will be inevitable. Sure enough, the cat is disobedient. Increasingly dependent on the bottle, the actress playing the hero’s mother forgets her lines but stands on her dignity: ‘With Federico it was just – One, two three!’ The lab ruins a crowd scene ...”