“... learning occurs at the synapse – that is to say, the junction between the two cells. The change may take the form either of an increase in the amount of neurotransmitter released by the first cell or an increase in the number of receptors on the second cell, which enables it to take up more neurotransmitter molecules. Rose found that in chicks which had ...”

“... The same disenchantment with Marxism that has deglamorised the Italian and Yugoslav partisans may now allow a more positive evaluation of the German Resistance. Historians are less preoccupied by the Resisters’ notions of the kind of government that should succeed Hitler’s and, in Chancellor Kohl’s assertive term, are perhaps less scandalised by ...”

“... relationships. It raises the possibility that the many tales emphasising the importance of paideia may tell us more about upper-class dreams of a perfect world than about how the surrounding society actually worked. The upper-class position was perhaps more complex, less self-assured than their rhetoric often admits. Civic notables in the later Empire ...”

“... in most unmaternal fashion. Still, no one could say this violence was ‘mystified’ so there may be no reason to quarrel with Barthes. We need to ask ourselves what genre of book Visser’s is. She is evidently deep into ancient history, as well as medieval and Renaissance etiquette books, colonial memoirs, cookery books of all nations, and American ...”

“... in 1914), firmly and misleadingly declared that the writer’s affair with Louise Colet ‘may be considered as the only sentimental episode of any importance in Flaubert’s life’. In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’ – thereby managing to rip off his entire face in ...”

“... of putting it, not his.) In the latter the poet is not speaking shiftily of others from whom he may easily distance himself (and the reader likewise): instead, he implicates himself and the rest of us in the experience – by dramatising it, by objectifying it, by giving it a frame, by finding a voice appropriate to the utterance of it. Thus, the Jew who ...”

“... it summons up which shows that the Palliser thesis is only half-right. For decades, the people may have been ignorant, but the politicians were not. This Falklands retrospective was commissioned by BBC Radio, and the interviews it prints with many of the major participants on both sides contain much material that could not be broadcast, the first import of ...”

“... Enchaîné, Gerson evokes memories of clerical anguish about masturbation; students of Erasmus may also too readily accept his delight in belittling an author he had studied as a boy. Dr Brown’s approach, a most fruitful one, is to concentrate on Gerson’s writing and preaching for simple folk, with its concern for morality, its seeds of Gallicanism and ...”

“... had felt a mission to introduce the subject to English people in such simple form that ‘who runs may read.’ He introduced notions – for example, that of the transitional object – which were to put psychoanalytic understandings at the centre of later work on the epistemology of creativity. Transitional objects are those, like Linus’s baby blanket, the ...”

“... which I think is concealed behind this story. I do not say that I have found the key. Other keys may turn the lock just as well. But this is what I now feel, which I did not feel before. The first clue I found was banal. Schama is both a man of our times and uncomfortable in his times. He is a man of our times in the sense that he is not going anywhere in ...”

“... tremour of agitation behind La Rochefoucauld’s calm comment that ‘however rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.’ Had he found at one time or another that everyone in the circle had let him down? But if you live in a hothouse of the commodity, like he and the salon ladies and gentlemen of his milieu, you must expect to find all ...”

“... to marry off one of the daughters Mr Poon has had by one of his concubines. ‘To have married May Ling, the daughter of a second concubine, into a respectable Cantonese family would have been an impossibility. Alternatively, setting her sights lower within the Chinese community would have been a major loss of face. Under the circumstances, a poor ...”

“... the fact that she’s been cast opposite Hadley because of their mutual resemblance. ‘Rose’ may be a more ‘unstable construction’ than she’d imagined. After a spell at home to watch over the death of her aunt, Rose escapes to Europe on the proceeds of her aunt’s mattress. In Greece she falls for the egregious Miles, and by this time we aren’t ...”

“... in James Kirkup’s autobiography, I, Of All People. ‘Ray Monk and others,’ he went on, ‘may be as intrigued as I was.’ The passage from Kirkup is as follows: ‘I was referred to specialists at the Ingham Infirmary in Westoe Road, and at the Newcastle Infirmary – where I had once spent a few days at the beginning of the war with ...”

“... world, brrrh.’ These remarks are only half-jokes. There are no jokes at all in a letter of 12 May 1958, by which time, it is true, Kokoschka had become yours disgusted, Villeneuve, Lake Geneva – where he and Olda had settled in 1953 – on most artistic and political issues: In our ‘non-objective’ epoch, especially now that they have the action ...”