“... on its own linguistic and figural character. Norris’s book is therefore a great advance on Frank Lentricchia, whose After the New Criticism depicts the Yale critics as camp-followers of changing philosophical fashions. Norris describes an independent and difficult search, which is attracted to philosophy not as a saving mechanism but as a lost ...”

“... recognises that discourse is not autonomous, but based on social practices, he can be more frank about the engaged, purposive character of his ‘history of the present’. No longer claiming, like the archaeologist, to be outside current social practices, the genealogist takes them seriously enough to want to rectify malignancies. Foucault has given ...”

“... and the political and cultural tensions which form the novel’s wider context are devastatingly close to our own. But Gee brings out the strangeness within the familiarity. Up to this point, my only acquaintance with New Zealand fiction had been through the delicate and evocative short stories of Frank Sargeson, recently ...”

“... had already succeeded in expanding her M.O.W. into M.O.W.O. Having married her maternal cousin, Frank Oliphant, before she ever laid claim to her work, the novelist managed to efface her maiden name and to emerge in print with her mother’s. Since that mother had a fierce conviction of the aristocratic superiority of her family to her husband’s, doubling ...”

“... are marred, made brutal by the imprint of vice, but Suguro unmistakably. By this time, even close friends and admiring disciples feel occasional doubts. Suguro, after all, is a rather special Japanese case, a man who has built a career on his commitment to Christian morality, a teacher who has attracted a reverent following. As one of his closest ...”

“... the story at a safe distance even in full force, and we pull our punches when the story cuts too close to the bone of reality. But fairy tales are always about experiences that actually happen and vivid incestuous episodes are found in both realistic and fantastic variants of the Cinderella story all over the world, not just in modern Europe. Often, highly ...”

“... pompousness and authority and rules and regulations; the little girl offered him a vehicle. The frank pleasure he shows in the spirited, defiant, capricious indocility of his heroines – both in the books and the photographs – does not tally at all with the ideal of Victorian maidenliness, even though Carroll often referred to his child friends in those ...”

“... a friend, ‘I admit to a taste for certain affectations and ornamental commissions.’ He was as frank as he could be about his artful concealments. His extensive correspondence with his family (just over 650 pages of letters to his mother, father and maternal grandmother), taken together with Mariani’s gruelling account of the parents’ marriage, makes ...”

“... is, after all, a museum in LA up on a bluff above the deep canyon the 405 runs through; it isn’t close to anything, except some mansions up in the heights with it, and public transport is largely an underclass phenomenon.) The old Getty in Malibu had been modelled after a Roman villa, all colonnades and porticos, and the new one, too, is full of Europeanate ...”

“... overwhelmingly ignored. As a result, it is extremely difficult, and mostly impossible, to hold any frank discussion of the most important issue affecting the position of the US in the Middle East or the open sympathy for terrorism in the region. A passionately held nationalism usually has the effect of corrupting or silencing those liberal intellectuals who ...”

“... give up on the idea of an oral history of Cuban life under communism. In 1975 he asked his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, who was enamoured of the revolution, to write it. García Márquez worked on the project for a year, then gave up. He told friends that what Cubans said didn’t fit the book that he wanted to ...”

“... occupation of Vietnam and Algeria throughout the 1940s and 1950s. On a personal level Breton was close to the Afro-Cuban-Chinese artist Wifredo Lam in Paris, and on his way to New York in 1941 he spent several weeks in Martinique, where he met with Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, key figures in the négritude movement (Aimé had published his great Cahier d’un ...”

“... Morrisette, the O’Jays, the Sims Twins) and rock (Buffalo Springfield, Iron Butterfly, Frank Zappa). And he had some ideas of his own. ‘A project had been forming in his mind for some time,’ Toop writes, ‘almost an opera, a folklore opera like the old medicine shows.’ At its centre would be a musical hoodoo man, a mysterious figure, almost ...”

“... calls, tactfully enough, ‘a carefully arranged life of the senses’. All three enjoyed the frank and gilded perquisites of money and class. Even the fashion writer Madge Garland, embarrassed by her provincial Australian roots and the only one of the three who really had to work for a living, might be described as aristocratic-by-default, in the same ...”

“... gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to bring his term of office to a close, ‘resign’ altogether too un-positive a word. The newspapers have been quite kind, but his speech, while ostensibly looking at the state of England, is so self-centred it confirms what one has thought before, that to Blair the real importance of his ...”