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“... would have no bite or relevance today. ‘Realism’ itself has become farcical, a mere means of proclaiming the nature of a text. In run-of-the-mill novels the dense domestic scene has degenerated into empty propaganda for this or that way of life – the last resort of the artist without a true subject. In Australia, realism – what Patrick ...”

“... inhabitants of Skye, confronted with a bill for costs connected with the toll bridge, ‘have no means of discovering whether or not the costs are fairly incurred. Indeed, as Miller Civil Engineering won’t tell them, they are unable to discover how much nearer they are to paying off the bridge than they were when it opened.’ As for the current obsession ...”

“... I never heard of such a thing before,’ and received the reply: ‘Haven’t you? Oh, it is by no means uncommon.’ Barrett Browning noted, also, that ‘Miss Cushman has an unimpeachable character.’ Cushman not only had a public partnership with Hays and, after her, with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, but a long secret affair with a young woman who married ...”

“... been made clear, still less where the money will come from to pay for the £7 billion in tax cuts David Cameron airily promised in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference last October. When such pledges are discussed in the media, it is usually in terms of whether they are funded or unfunded – whether the numbers ‘add up’. Osborne’s Autumn ...”

“... thinking, however, our habits are dangerous for them, but also for us: we are eating beyond our means and stretching our supply lines. A food supply that depends on imports (90 per cent of the fruit we consume, 60 per cent of the vegetables) is vulnerable: food policy experts were advancing this view well before the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. VFC ...”

“... In the élite minority arts of the 20th century, the US component is one of many, and by no means the most important. On the other hand, it penetrates, indeed dominates, the popular culture of the globe with the single exception of sport, which still echoes the British hegemony over the 19th-century era of bourgeoisie and the first Industrial Revolution, via tennis, golf and, above all, association football ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... in three of the most brilliant chapters in her new book – after Freud but not for Freud. David Aberbach, by contrast, is oddly impressed by how much Great Writers in the past knew about loss without having read John Bowlby. If new disciplines like psychoanalysis thrive initially on fantasies of purity, they can only be sustained by what looks like ...”

“... much and no more than the weight of evidence adduced in support of them. So with relief we turn to David Bell’s collection of essays by ten academics and the secretary of the Fabian Society, most of whom have had a good deal of varied practical experience at home or abroad. Their names may not be household words even in Labour circles, but without exception ...”

“... visiting philosopher in the US: his ideas are discussed by the authors of the essays assembled by David Hoy in Foucault: A Critical Reader. The French Foucault and the American Foucault are not two sides of one and the same thinker: they are philosophers who hold entirely incompatible doctrines. People have for a long time wondered whether Foucault ...”

“... Their suggestion is simpler. There is no paranoia, or paranoia is everywhere. For Thomas, this means anything goes (‘since fiction is a kind of dream, and history is a kind of dream, and this is both’). For Stone, it means whoever is passionate and well-intentioned must be right. The most interesting feature of ...”

“... hero of Serbian prose,’ the journalist Luka Mičeta remarked in an interview with Tišma. David Rieff, in an afterword to Kapo, speaks of Tišma’s ‘bottomless pessimism’. But the novel would be much more pessimistic if Lamian were able to ignore his past crimes and simply enjoy life. Instead, he recognises that there is no way back for him, that ...”

“... Persian Gulf a vital US national security interest and committed the United States to using ‘any means necessary, including military force’ to secure that interest. To make the commitment credible, the Pentagon created the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), an embryonic instrument of military intervention. At the urging of his national security ...”

“... i.e. new Oulipo, for proof.) These methods let writers treat words and letters not as means to expression but as things to be rearranged. They lead, Perloff argues, to ‘the elimination of ego’. Concrete poetry, too, treats words and letters as things. Haroldo de Campos, a Brazilian concrete poet, called such art ‘verbivocovisual’ because ...”