“... to a different past, the one presided over by Gloriana rediviva; and the Queen’s own strenuous self-propaganda in the last years of her reign, unconvincing in her lifetime, became all too potent once she was dead. Ironically, the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled ...”

“... cataclysmic change. In England, the Wars of the Roses were the favoured candidate, bringing the self-destruction of the feudal nobility and clearing the way for the arrival of the Tudors and their non-feudal servants. More recently, the emphasis has been on earlier, gradual change, in which feudal assessments are replaced by Parliamentary taxation or the ...”

“... of someone like Jérôme Lindon, founding editor at Editions de Minuit, Girodias comes across as a self-serving hustler and Trocchi as his willing pimp. It is unclear what makes Trocchi’s story worth telling in the first place. He was a bit-player with a very large ego, and basically irrelevant to anything that might pass for understanding ‘post-war ...”

“... appreciation of its visual subject-matter immeasurably enriched. Unlike the traditional survey’s self-contained, totalising narrative, Nineteenth-Century Art will provide students with a point of departure for a multiplicity of investigations. For the modern period at least, the leftist struggle to transform the history of art appears to have been won ...”

“... scarcely developed. It remained a novelty style. Pugin’s father, the French émigré artist and self-styled count, Auguste Charles, had published books of Gothic details, drawn to scale from medieval buildings, that contributed to a better understanding of historic design. But Pugin Senior was still quite happy to design fire irons with handles in the shape ...”

“... girl) died at birth, and left the writer with a sense of forever being in search of his other self, an obsession heightened by heroic ingestion of psychotropic drugs in the Sixties. Banks’s own career bifurcates, if less pathologically than Philip K. Dick’s. As with the novelist/entertainer Graham Greene (acknowledged as one of his favourite ...”

“... carry much the same kind of passport as their fellow Europeans; and that brave vestige of British self-consequence, ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires ...’, may fade from memory. The Empire has long since faded, and this means that the monarchy’s global pretensions – like its world-wide tours – are a thing of the ...”

“... or brainwashed, by manuals of etiquette, supported by the precepts of Martin Tupper and the self-help exhortations of Samuel Smiles. One essential was to know the rules of good conversation. In their earlier years these strivers might well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler ...”

“... unimaginative. When it quotes a poem, in acts as though, in the context, the poem’s meaning is self-evident. After Mondor’s lengthy, soft-focus tome, it is rather refreshing to read about Mallarmé’s financial and professional incompetence. Instead of idealising the poetic temperament above all else, this biographer occasionally expresses his ...”

“... to a Post-Modernist obsession with the status of dehumidifiers as art objects, or with the self-reflexivity of the visitor’s gaze (literally enacted, if you want, with the help of a few mirrors). It can take on board the traditional museum connoisseur too, giving new life to the old debates about (in the case of the British Museum) what colour to ...”

“... is brilliant, stimulating, intriguing in the essay, yet the transitions are so vertiginous, the self-contradictions so blatant (they may of course be innate characteristics of ‘fantastic literary criticism’), that the whole seems less than a sum of the parts. At times, too, Pushkin the poet proves too protean even for Sinyavsky’s sudden changes of ...”

“... fashion. Critics on his own side may sometimes see him as a ‘bloody pest’, but in reality his self-chosen role, always underrated in party politics, is that of the candid friend. It has cost him advancement. He had no sooner achieved long-coveted rank as a Front Bench spokesman (on science) than he was dismissed by Michael Foot, then Labour ...”

“... America comes into the act with recent scholarship arguing that Christopher Columbus – in his self-appointed task as Christoferens, of Christ-bearer – relied heavily on works which connected great conjunctions with change in empires. He noted the rulership of Saturn over India, and copied out a passage of a work deriving from Bacon which said that the ...”

“... his or her life. Often, perhaps usually, this sensitivity varies independently of the projects of self-creation which the person undertakes in his or her work. I can clarify what I mean by ‘chance events’ and by ‘independent variation’ by sketching a slightly different possible world – a world in which Heidegger joins his fellow ...”

“... allow it: if it did, the imposition of the writer’s will would seem arbitrary. In any case, the self-absorption of the characters provides them with a certain degree of protection. The children trying in their vulnerable egotism to make sense of the same quality in grown-ups, or the irritability of the dying with the living who won’t see or do what they ...”