“... amatory and alcoholic excess. We never quite got the hang of each other, code-wise. I think he may have been disappointed at my failure to respond in kind with ‘Hey, ma MAN!’ or ‘You betchar-ASS!’, professional courtesies not often heard by the banks of the Trent. For my part, I had some difficulty in understanding his general observations on life ...”

“... through to a distinction, ‘but I wanted you to think it too.’ Potential readers, of course, may or may not be pleased that Burnyeat is making them do so much work – particularly as the dialogue’s parts increase in difficulty and the introduction’s discussion of options gets longer and more complex. He informs us ...”

“... and, therefore, leaves most of us not knowing quite where to look, how to say things. (Poets may help us with that.) In San Francisco, there are organisations for people who test HIV negative – to enable them to contribute, to feel less guilty about being ‘fit’. When I met Gunn there in 1989, the Bay Area Reporter, a give-away paper, had a dozen ...”

“... in books such as this one do no service to that history. Still, if these pictures do seduce, they may also impel the smitten to discover more about the object of desire. For the intellectually curious the footnotes are a more than adequate bibliography. Mr Platt, I believe, claims far too much. ‘Life-styles,’ he says in his Preface, are my subject, and ...”

“... of Hill’s prose. There is a further change from the earlier volume, suggesting that Hill may have responded to comments made by, among others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his ...”

“... The dispute is conducted in the languages of theology, jurisprudence, humanism and philosophy, and may be said to have been held together by a concept of ‘the political’ sufficiently coherent and idiosyncratically Latin and Western to raise the question whether ‘political thought’ can be held to exist in the culture of other civilisations without ...”

“... the novella; and in the second story the men who make Raymond watch the cremation of Kim’s body may be dark angels, or minor devils, or simply crematorium workers with some knowledge of the dead girl. The epigraph is Rilke’s: ‘Every angel is terrible.’ The central figure of ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’, Janet, was young in the early Seventies: one of those ...”

“... should spend, what they should read and what they should watch. Latterday members of this élite may have been true to their Victorian forebears in exacting duty from themselves and deference from others, but both of these attitudes now stuck in the gullet of Essex Man. The policies of the Eighties were intended to strip them of their cultural authority, and ...”

“... awe they cast behind them. Pavlov stressed that conditioning could be anticipatory, that the dog may salivate on the expectation rather than the stimulus of bell or food – and this implies far more active, spontaneously active, processes than reflex arcs. This book describes Pavlov’s background, though we learn little of his personal life, beyond his ...”

“... There is one leading character, a male. His fortunes vary so extremely and abruptly that he may not be recognised in one phase of life by friends and relatives from another. At times he enjoys great privilege and authority, but at other times his liberty is severely restricted and his mind and will may be ...”

“... Both are skilled in the use of stock characters, people who seem familiar, so that we may guess how they will respond to events – guess, not predict, for Archer and Raven are acquainted with the least-likely-person technique. Both add credibility by making use of their personal acquaintance with well-known politicians: but they have different ...”

“... Carel van Mander in 1603, the earliest account of Caravaggio’s art that is known to us, we may deduce that Caravaggio was the first European artist who ostentatiously disdained invention and the ideal. He adhered instead to an artistic purpose that can only be called realist with a defiance which anticipated the attitudes of those 19th-century painters ...”

“... over her recently-acquired fiancé, who has unaccountably disappeared for some weeks and so may well be dead. It takes Holmes a couple of days to show that he is still alive and not at all likely to prove an agreeable husband. This is decidedly no three-pipe problem. Mr Symons’s plot is of a modest near-transparency from the start – a fact cunningly ...”

“... that is to say that its metaphysical status is more or less acknowledged. In short, metaphysics may at the moment lay claim to the mind at its natural and favoured proving-ground: so to say, in lieu of The Universe as a whole: contracting into a microcosm. In its own small way, this signals a return to content in a subject which has over long been ...”

“... from close up. Much of its delight and terror is almost microscopic in source. Non-climbers may associate the sport with acrophobic spaces, alp on alp arising, but most of the climber’s experience is lived on a scale of millimetres rather than kilometres. Usually, after all, rock-climbers in particular must face inward, their eyes fixed intently on ...”