“... process from cranks and fanatical complainants, and from the sort of publicity which means that no one can ever write down a frank opinion of an employee or candidate. Beyond that, it is a matter of making sure that information can be known to those whom it concerns and not to others, and this is not easy, particularly when – as these books ...”

“... of the Riace bronzes now housed in Reggio di Calabria, which are described by the present curator David Ekserdjian, nem con, as ‘among the most stupendous works of art in existence’. Such ballon is achieved through the cire perdue or lost wax technique. This involves making a solid model, usually of wax or wax-finished but sometimes of stone or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Clinton to run for the Senate in New York. He is head of the House Committee on Ways and Means, which means that he holds the purse strings. Charlie knows where the bodies are buried and quite a bit else. The Obama speech is political convention boilerplate, the usual ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”