“... been established: on their day off, men went drinking and women went to church. The women of Paris may have had little time for the priests the old regime had foisted on them, but they preserved the image of a male saviour who was gentle, celibate and ready to die. They cherished at the same time, Roudinesco says, the image of Marat, but for a different ...”

“... and Hitler, for whom anti-smoking was merely a sideline. Contemporary anti-smokers, though they may sometimes seem equally despotic by temperament, have a more limited area of concern: their own bodies – and in some cases, those of their nearest and dearest. From this tender little shrine, however, it is a stone’s throw to the cathedral of ‘personal ...”

“... how the intentions of designers and makers are embroidered, elaborated and subverted. Buildings may be old or new: the life in them is, by definition, modern. Halle’s book corrects any tendency one might have to believe that there can be, or ever was, a golden age when an uncorrupted system of visual codes governed the man-made environment. Perhaps in a ...”

“... between what he is as a creature of nature ... and those other creatures of nature which we may, without derogation, call objects.’ By reconnecting language to its origins in the body, principally the ‘EAR’ and the ‘BREATH’, poetry and life, it is argued, will regain the organic vitality they lost just before Herodotus. Much of the millennial ...”

“... Arafat contented himself with nine separate security services; now he has 12, some say 14. They may make him feel safer, but they don’t have that effect on anyone else. Flying home I read Anthony Burgess’s verse novel Byrne, which, unlike Auden’s poems, mainly uses the Don Juan stanza. It contains some excellent Byronic lines, but after ten days in ...”

“... Even more telling, he shows Henry to have been an efficient and discerning ruler. Odd as the claim may seem, although it would not have seemed at all strange to the King himself, Henry epitomised the ideal of the Renaissance prince, the focal point of a humanist enterprise aimed at educating the one person in the realm who had power over everything. When ...”

“... universals that influence art everywhere.’ And while he agrees that the concept of ‘art’ may be problematic, this is not so much because it marks off a domain of intensified aesthetic power and value, but because of the way in which the domain is defined. For the Western viewer, ‘Oceanic art’ is associated above all with objects in museums, and ...”

“... history of this interaction and examines its consequences. He makes the claim with his title (I May Be Some Time) and subtitle (‘Ice and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to ...”

“... appears as something sublime; and a man who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean his death, is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.’ Arendt’s sombre vision struck a nerve. In a memoir of New York intellectual life, Midge Decter has recalled the debates that raged in the early Fifties over Arendt’s ...”

“... to personal abuse than most men.’ Characteristically, she does not whinge about this; but it may help explain her own steely determination, and often her unrelenting hardness, as a defence mechanism. Moreover, as a woman she still felt a sense of alienation from this particularly male-dominated club. Again, rather than vainly seeking acceptance, she ...”

“... The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1979 delivered a speech on ‘the American malaise’ that may have been composed, and was certainly inspired, by Lasch, and whose chief effect was to deliver large numbers of voters to the upbeat Reagan. In the last fifteen years of his life, he seemed to take a curious pleasure in being out of the mainstream; it is ...”

“... pregnant with a view to avoiding, a custodial sentence. The possibility, however, that other women may do that is one of many factors I have to bear in mind in this difficult case.’ Spot the difference? The whole nasty episode situates Pickles in the body of judges who send women to prison more often and for longer than men with similar records who are ...”

“... surviving the Age of Aquarius), but as the age of the personality. ‘Whatever that was,’ they may well add. For posterity, let me explain about personality. It might be supposed that in order to be one, an individual ought to have one. If this was true in the past (was it? Was drinking too much and killing big fish evidence that Hemingway was someone we ...”

“... great barrier here is that the housing market has frozen solid, especially at the upper end, so it may be all but impossible to sell up. (This, note, despite 16 per cent inflation.) And if you do sell up, you can’t get your money out, except by currency fraud and at a punitive exchange rate. For all that, many do it: white people leak abroad and so does ...”

“... F.R. Leavis, as well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired and which Wittgenstein may or may not have read or seen but was not predisposed to like. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Hawkes is merely engaged in a ludic ramble. He earns some of his jokes, and one of the best things about his books is that ...”