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“... should look in their bound form. But with what descriptive flair he applies his veto: ‘Dear Frank, I just got the photostat of the new jacket design for ADA, and I do not like it at all. The lettering is dumpy, with apertures en cul-de-poule. The coloration of the word ADA recalls at first blush the nacrine inner layer of a dejected shellfish, and, at a ...”

“... as an ancestor by the present generation of Northern Irish poets. You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for ...”

“... with a million million million million million times the power of a human mind’. And Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, possibly the book nearest in flavour to Dyson’s, goes so far as to predict a system with infinite computing power. Again, why is Dyson so confident that spreading through their galaxy will make humans too far apart ...”

“... was special. Mies van der Rohe was asked to design it after a committee had considered both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: Phyllis Lambert, an architect and the daughter of the head of Seagram, persuaded her father that the opportunity to give New York a great building should not be lost. The Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor – a ...”

“... might well have been some roadman who had just helped the larger out of a drain – which is very close to the note of Katherine Mansfield’s comic deflations of the masculine order, such as the occasion when she feels faint at an exhibition of Naval photographs in 1918 and is assisted by ‘two Waacs and a Wren’: They asked me ... whether I had lost ...”

“... The post scriptum date, on the other hand, is unpronounceable or at best variously pronounceable. Close scrutiny, you might say, is one thing; obsessive and fruitless scrutiny another. McCormack’s main contention seems to be that ‘ascendancy’ and ‘tradition’ alike are figments of the imagination of W.B. Yeats. It’s well-known, of course, that the ...”

“... violence of the empty phrase could only be countered by the shrewdest form of ridicule, a contempt close to the heart. His aphorisms turned empty phrases inside out. The goat-like satyr on the front cover of Die Fackel suggests, as Edward Timms says, ‘that for the Kraus of the 1890s satire was a vaguely defined primitive force disrupting the civilities of a ...”

“... Barker describes a peculiarly irritating ‘Clicking Colonel’ in Whitehall who ‘came really close to the caricature so beloved of those who distrust and lampoon the Military’. Well, I can only suggest that Mr Barker read Alan Judd’s novel if he wishes to discover what makes such a Colonel click – for outside of Evelyn Waugh I know of no caricature ...”

“... of the Universe’), who ‘liked beginnings and endings’ and perhaps has read Edward Said and Frank Kermode. And in this He is also in the image of His maker, for Malamud’s book has its own academic accoutrements, including a Preface which (like that of any learned monograph) acknowledges the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for ...”

“... us that at this stage Théroigne had not learned to write. More likely, as her 1911 biographer Frank Hamel says, she earned her living as a seamstress. But then in 1778, when she was about sixteen, her luck changed. She met a Mme Colbert, who engaged her as a companion, arranged music lessons for her, and took her around Europe. Théroigne had considerable ...”

“... sortie to the hamlets of My Lai would be their long-awaited chance to engage the 48th Battalion at close quarters, and to get even for their dead buddies. In case they were worried about risks to civilians, intelligence reports offered them the risible assurance that all genuine non-combatants would be out at the market at that time of day, leaving only the ...”

“... Households, the new American data turn out to be very similar. The new data for Britain, also, are close to the American ones. A disturbing aspect of both new surveys is their single-minded and reiterated claim that ‘the choices we make about our sex lives are dramatically affected by our social circumstances.’ Surely they are also influenced biologically ...”

“... Flaubert’s letters are in truth the best of their century in French, a wonderfully frank, powerful and animated compendium of his moods, his attitudes and his ideas concerning the practice of his art. Why would Proust go out of his way to condemn them, if not to warn his own posterity that a great writer may (or must?) write second-rate ...”

“... on our hanging onto stories in our heads, being ready for their return – the effect is about as close to simultaneity, or a split-screen, as one could get on pages that run in lines and have to be turned over one after another. But the tour de force, and the reader’s induction to this method, is the prologue. It recounts the famous baseball game of ...”

“... other than alive. The trick was to distinguish appealing and enabling myths from noxious ones. Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, written before Kermode came across Barthes, I think, but nevertheless a book that seems to have Barthes in mind, to be waiting for him, thought an attention to the difference between myth and fiction might do some of this ...”