“... however much some would wish it otherwise. There is thus nothing untimely in the publication of Peter Clarke’s elegant and absorbing book. Dr Clarke writes it consciously as a historian, and though he generously acknowledges the work of those students of Keynes who are economists, his approach is primarily historical. He works on two ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...”

“... Her name was Sophie Catchprice. She had bell-bottomed jeans and long blonde hair like Mary in Peter Paul and Mary. She had bare feet and chipped red nail-polish on her toenails. She stood at the door of her bedroom one Saturday afternoon and saw her husband sucking her younger son’s penis. What’s admirable here is that Carey manages not only to shock ...”

“... with malice aforethought and for publication, to the diaries of Pepys who did not mean to be read. This is not to say that the Lyttelton Hart-Davis correspondence has not been found to be immensely readable. In his introduction to the sixth volume the editor explains that when the first of the volumes was ready for the press in 1978 he ‘had no great ...”

“... encouraged her as a writer and had been the first to seek publishers; that her first publisher, Peter Davies, had fostered her talent; and that Randall Jarrell had revived interest in her work. But there was an anger beyond these particular corrections which is well remembered by those who knew her in her last years. One colleague recalls her screwing up a ...”

“... the books will appear both to see and go through a great deal. The most disquieting voyage to read about is that of E.M. Forster’s Mrs Moore. She is a perfectly willing traveller, although she prefers being at home, and looks forward to getting back there. But her passage to India destroys the point of her life. In a sense it works too well – the ...”

“... like a totem, a lone barn, a rock-mouth funnelling down into the bowel of the limestone. If you read closely between the lines of Wainwright’s treatment of the Buttermere fell called Haystacks in his Western Fells of 1966 – the seventh book of his series on the Lakeland fells – a physical and emotional identity between the man and the place begins to ...”

“... work, taking precedence over the philosophical rulebooks and homilies favoured by Foucault and Peter Brown in their researches on sexuality. This deliberate prioritising of the erotic genre over the philosophical is celebrated by a striking image on the cover: Aristotle, on all fours, ridden by the hetaera Phyllis brandishing a whip. Considered morally ...”

“... elude that soporific ‘and then’? So, it is little surprise to find the prolific genre-bender Peter Ackroyd beginning his brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe with a recounting of his subject’s final days. Never mind that Paul Strathern’s recent biographical study, Poe in 90 Minutes, and a new novel by Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow, made the same ...”

“... Sir John Myres recorded in 1953), ‘Sir, if Herodotus was such a fool as they say, why do we read him for Greats?’ Even though the secrets of his workshop aren’t all out yet (a favourite apothegm of Momigliano’s), it’s safe to say that we have a far better understanding of Herodotean method than our predecessors did. That’s no small ...”

“... striking similarities, notably on incomes policy, Europe and trade-union reform – which can be read in different ways. One way is to talk of consensus – a philosophical explanation stressing convergence and agreement between the Conservative Party and Labour. Another is to point to the temptations of opposition and the imperatives of government in ...”

“... those where it is most evident. But it is not only for these that The Decline of Power should be read. It is a fair-minded book, though the author is a little free with condemnations of ‘nonsense’ and ‘ridiculous’. It is fluently, even racily written, but rarely superficially. The publishers will, if they have any sense, follow the example of Fontana ...”

“... Abstract Expressionism had been done, What next? The answer seemed to be a canvas that would read as one field. The very idea of imagery became anathema to him. ‘Imagery,’ Irwin says, ‘constituted a second order of reality, whereas I was after a first order of presence.’ At this point he realised that the straight line was the least ...”

“... of his psychology. One of the reasons so much of the second volume of the letters is depressing to read is one’s sense of the second-rateness and constriction of Forster’s English milieu from the Twenties on. He was living in a diminished and oppressive world: ‘how much of my time I spend with second rate people,’ he exlaims in 1943. The effect is ...”

“... of the Savoy, Leonard Smithers, himself a great connoisseur of erotica, Beardsley noted: ‘I read in the papers here that Stead has established an agency for the adoption of children. Is it true? If so I certainly mean to adopt some nice little girl who could at once satisfy my maternal, amatory and educational instincts. This quite seriously.’ It was ...”