“... of seriousness. It has been raised from the level of nostalgia and trivia by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality ...”

“... It will be seen that these horrible facts are absolutely fundamentally unacceptable. They may win their authors a Nobel Prize, but those who discuss the mind know that something is seriously wrong. Sperry reappears on the scene to make matters worse. In a series of experiments, he examined the apparent mosaic representation of the world in a ...”

“... afternoon into the heat of the tropics. They leave a smell of the impossible. Individually they may not be profound; they may not, like travel, be broadening. But the pleasure and the power are enormous. This taste of the unfamiliar has of course to come from the travellers themselves, from their expectations and their ...”

“... of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The rummager among old books has done his bit again. Warton may have been Camden Professor of History at Oxford when he knew Malone, but he seems to have been quite happy in his role as under-labourer. He is often sent scuttling off to the Bodleian by his ambitious ‘friend’. He seems to relish being asked, say, to ...”

“... time I was working, one floor below his, in collaboration with his formidable ideological critic Richard Lewontin – the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen Jay Gould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between ...”

“... artists inevitably construct and invent their representations of American experience, whatever we may mean by this vague, polymorphous concept, rather than simply revealing a pre-existing entity through a transparent lens. The metaphor is misleading from the start. Certainly, Hughes’s project cannot be faulted on the basis of coverage: it starts out with ...”

“... the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour. In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they ...”

“... of less than £2000, they proposed to pay the managing director alone £350 a year). But Cambridge may in any case have been an unwise place in which to launch a venture of this kind. The locals, it’s been suggested, were never likely to be enticed away from bathing in the Cam (and certainly not if the alternative cost two and six). Ferdinand Mount, who ...”

“... the author’s identity, the author’s credentials, the date, the very words on the page – may be corrupted,’ and that, as a result, we should ‘proceed with extreme caution’. Wahrman is certainly right that cheap print was a chaos of variants: but that is precisely the problem with his thesis. Such ‘slips’ were everywhere. According to Early ...”

“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... unintended outcome of a Supreme Court ruling exercising jurisdiction over Guantánamo detainees may be that, in the future, capture of terrorism suspects will be foregone in favour of killing them.’ All that advocates of legal rights were going to achieve was the death of suspected terrorists, not their fair treatment. But has Obama’s switch from a ...”

“... at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the ...”

“... escape the biological round of cultivation and consumption; it is a hopelessly natural object. It may, however, as anything in nature may, find its way into literature, and thence into the literature of literature, or in this instance Nature and Language. The subject of this jaunty, promising but muddled book is the ...”

“... chocolates and Alka-Seltzer in the 1960s and 1970s. When visiting Duchamp on holiday in Cadaqués, Richard Hamilton and John Cage would try to avoid having to meet Dalí, whose villa was close by, and their hauteur is still felt by art historians and curators: Dalí was marginalised at the Hayward Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006, and at ...”

“... secular verse. Guest concentrates exclusively on Smart as a religious poet, in fact, and it may be a sign of our current lack of confidence in literary ‘greatness’ that ‘the ambition and significance’ of his achievement are eventually defined in a context of mid-18th-century religious preoccupations. Making clear the contemporary issues at stake ...”