“... all the concrete details as well can leave you feeling bored with their brilliance – Wyndham Lewis is an outstanding example. But a writer who supplies the concrete details and leaves out the indispensable points can only exhaust you. Mrs Krantz is right to pride herself on the accuracy of her research into every department of the high life. What she ...”

“... the rural poor. During his time in Antrim he met and courted an Anglican clergyman’s daughter, Jane Waring, who turned him down when he made the one formal proposal of his life. When the opportunity arose to return to Moor Park in the spring of 1696, he left Kilroot as soon as he could and didn’t take up another church post until after Temple’s death ...”

“... orator, he resigned the post when he came into some money in 1628. The following year he married Jane Danvers, a cousin of his stepfather’s. His kinsman the earl of Pembroke procured him the church living of Fugglestone and Bemerton, two villages on the edge of Salisbury, near Wilton House, the Pembroke seat. Herbert was ordained in Salisbury Cathedral in ...”

“... Harold and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange ...”

“... are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture and mind.’ Romantic portraits of Crazy Jane, a poor servant girl seduced and abandoned by her lover; Lucia di Lammermoor with its picture of female sexuality as insane violence against men; Bertha Mason and Gothic madness – violent and hideous animality kept caged in Mr Rochester’s attic lest a ...”

“... provided the helicopters and a week or two of basic training for the cast.Thomson reckons it was Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) that first established the grammar of the ‘good battle scene’: high-angle points of view, a ‘tracking motion’ to ‘animate or excite’ the progress of an attack, an editorial ‘cut and ...”

“... refers in particular to the way Ramsey’s work anticipates that of Kuhn, Dummett, Nozick and D.K. Lewis. The paper he singles out as ‘the one from which we still have most to learn’ is ‘General Propositions and Causality’, one of the ‘Last Papers’, It deals with the distinction between a scientific law and a merely accidentally true ...”

“... origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is our great provincial.’ The sentence rumbles ...”

“... at the end I had tears in my eyes.’ Among the Bloomsbury ‘items’ commissioned by Kenneth and Jane Clark was a grand Wedgwood dinner service created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1935. The two artists chose to paint the 48 plates (out of 140 pieces) with a series of portraits of great women, including Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf ...”

“... the beloved ‘best companion’ to whom she dedicated The Song of the Lark; the second with Edith Lewis, a fellow spinster from Nebraska with whom she lived in New York from 1913 to her death – we know next to nothing. The elusive Duse, one feels, would have approved. The same preference for austerity informs Acocella’s view of Cather and her ...”

“... one thing being said and another meant), I want to suggest a more cryptic guide than Orwell or Lewis Carroll. Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid, which is in the National Gallery and can be glimpsed in Fred Wiseman’s film, is a work of immediately seductive voluptuousness that tantalises thought with its gorgeous mysteries. According to ...”

“... one does not go to Sydenham for wives.’ At the beginning of the narrative he has married Jane, a lady better suited to the style of the house than the personality of David Peterley himself. But after this empty and passionless union is ended, it seems as if he will repeat the error by sacrificing Polly to his obsession with the past and marry another ...”

“... preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s writings.) Bunche is a ...”

“... Said made plain that he saw many of the best-known scholars of the Middle East, notably Bernard Lewis, as heirs of 19th-century Orientalism – and as apologists for, if not servants of, a new imperialism.The value of Said’s book was immediately evident to intellectuals who felt their treatment by Western scholarship had been no less punishing. ‘You are ...”

“... an ideal and a reality, as Greville and Sidney well knew, the distance may be large. When C.S. Lewis, in the Oxford History of English Literature, called Sidney ‘that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied’, he provided unwitting testimony to the success of Greville’s legend. It is only recently that the gap ...”