“... totality of its rupture with the past: ‘not only did the middle class thus rule society, but it may be said to have formed it.’ But, for the moderate liberals, this infant society had to be protected against monsters on either flank. Too strong a blow against the Ancien Régime’s relics, and the plebs might submerge the Revolution in violence and ...”

“... been behavioural exercises of the crudest sort that have helped me with my agoraphobia. When, in May, I started a three-month sabbatical from the London Review, I was still suffering the effects of that earlier wobbly: I was still having to be careful, and still having to fight off mini-wobblies and anxiety attacks more or less every time I went out. One of ...”

“... of the menace. This script is quite moving to read. James Plunkett’s The Circus Animals may fairly be called a traditional novel, very skilful and good-hearted, quite challenging. It is bound to be a widely-read paperback, possibly an admired and popular television adaptation, like Plunkett’s celebrated Strumpet City: we would not want Pinter to ...”

“... experiences were not so desperate or tragic as he would have us believe.” ’ However that may be, we have the evidence of Herbert Read – himself certainly a wartime soldier of distinction and, incidentally, the author of one of the best accounts of action on the Western Front, In Retreat – that in 1917 Aldington ‘looked extremely handsome in his ...”

“... where Wesley’s earlier novel The Camomile Lawn was set. As historical fiction A Sensible Life may well be compared with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years, a narrative of events in 1937 and 1938 which is the first of a planned trilogy spanning the war years. Both like to drip-feed us with nostalgia, and neither is poisonous. Both, too, tend to ...”

“... investigate her history at length and conclude that though the birth of psychoanalysis through her may have been a myth, it was a necessary one. The pro-woman side of Freud’s ambivalence is visible in his warm descriptions of his early patients: Cäcilie M. was ‘uniquely gifted’ and a ‘highly intelligent woman’, Emmy von N. a ‘highly ...”

“... The tensions underlying modern masculinity derive from a state of unacknowledged dependence, and may have contributed to the rise of the feminist movement; they are certainly aggravated by it. With the achievement (pace Delphy and Leonard) of many of women’s egalitarian demands, and the loss of biological power implicit in the adoption of birth ...”

“... were zipping through an amendment a minute. This is undeniably high productivity – which may have been just what Mrs Thatcher intended when she put the heat on them. But it is hard to argue that legislative Stakhanovism on this scale is evidence of, or even compatible with, the work of an effective revising chamber. Moreover, Donald Shell and his ...”

“... Watkins knows that the forms of victimisation are as variable and beautiful as a rainbow: anything may fall into the hands of his enemies – a teddybear, his name – and anyone may be his enemy. He and his chums contemplate self-defence against a teacher who likes to grip their balls while asking them questions – but ...”

“... it is worth pausing over, since it appears currently in the most varied intellectual circles, and may not be as turbid as it looks. It concerns our confusions about ‘the referent’. His book, Prendergast says, ‘is not about the referent “Paris”, but about certain symbolic representations, various manifestations of the discursive category ...”

“... disreputable sister, spiritualism, became just as entangled with ideas of gender. Spiritualism may be understood as an elaborated expression of Victorian thinking about what it is to be female. In its early origins and growth, and its later humiliations and submersion, Owen has found a pattern for a searching critique of the means by which Victorian women ...”

“... satirised, it is not in disgrace. The manifold interpretations of life lie side by side, or one may come to the rescue of the others. Tolstaya’s world is crowded with physical objects. It is also magical, animated, and conscious of all there is from the enormous sky to the ‘secret potato cities’ beneath the soil. The fog is impatient, the ...”

“... fight in February, the Las Vegas Hilton announced an estimated loss of $3 million. Similar losses may well have been incurred in July. Yet the money earned by Tyson in the time it takes to fry a scallop is generous by any standard – $20 million for flattening Spinks – and well beyond the likely lifetime earnings of all the PAL gym boxers ...”

“... human weight they once carried in their own time. When such an offering is made, the chill shades may speak to us again, and perhaps more gently than we had thought they might, in the strange tongue of a long-lost Christianity. Whether they will say anything of help or comfort for our own times the readers of this book must decide for themselves.’ Brown’s ...”

“... pain of breaking up; it is all a supremely masochistic exercise. Along the way, intense pleasure may be derived from the experience, however intermittent, of selfless musical co-operation at a high level of intensity. But that brings its own dangers. Alcohol and drugs are an almost inevitable concomitant of such high-tension music-making, largely because ...”