“... At moments like this, the career charted by these essays is like something from the brain of Peter York, an intellectual Style Wars. Whether or not you can translate ‘the specificity ...’ into ‘the distinctive thing ...’ is a vexing question, and one on which the newness of theory in part hinges. For theory certainly has a new vocabulary, but ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... is unfavourably impressed with her high-pitched voice. Sontag visits Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky in their hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur; years later she will berate herself for namedropping the connection (‘how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year?’). Sontag goes to her first Paris party, at the home of the philosopher Jean ...”

“... also Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: A Text and it Contexts by Neil Foxlee (Peter Lang, 2010) and We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria by Allison Drew (Manchester, 2014).  Conor Cruise O’Brien’s critique of Camus was the first title in the Fontana Modern Masters series, edited by Frank Kermode. Many of ...”

“... is no special cello in Lasker-Wallfisch’s story. (Born Lasker, she married the pianist Peter Wallfisch after she emigrated to Britain; they helped found the English Chamber Orchestra.) Kennedy offered to try to track down the one she lost in the Holocaust, but she wasn’t interested: ‘It was a different life.’ (That cello was a not-so-distant ...”

“... the promotion of criminality – of a lawless ‘grey zone’ of the kind evoked by Primo Levi, in which members of a persecuted group are enlisted to police, brutalise and, at times, kill their own – has become a defining feature of Israel’s rule inside Gaza.In The Arabs and the Holocaust, published in 2010 and recently reissued, Gilbert ...”

“... her most eloquent letters were written from prison.) The essay would be published in 1922 by Paul Levi, her former lawyer and, some say, briefly her lover. He chose his moment carefully, preparing the manuscript only after the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, one of the first people’s revolts against the Bolshevik regime. In fact there was no limit to ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”

“... his writing. Zuckerman first appeared in My Life as a Man, but as the creation of another writer, Peter Tarnopol, rather than Roth. This is really a new start for him. Zuckerman is at a crossroads, having written stories based on his New Jersey Jewish background that have caused offence within the family. (There are many points of correspondence between ...”