“... and yet, as Luria says, they are of the most fundamental importance, so much so that they may demand a new sort of neurology, a ‘romantic science’, as he liked to call it. Luria thought a science of this kind would be best introduced by a story – a detailed case-history of man with a profound right-hemisphere disturbance, a case-history which ...”

“... periodicals. It acquired considerable influence and circulation before its shutdown in May 1863, as well as keeping the heads of the brothers Dostoevsky above water financially. Both brothers were heroes, in terms of the efforts they made and the volume of work they undertook, but the elder, Mikhail, was the more heroic of the two, and when he died ...”

“... Mr Rhodes James manages to be both informative and discreet about his parentage (his real father may have been George Wyndham) and the failure of his first marriage. Yet all too soon he is on the defensive, acquitting Eden of vanity and arrogance and repeatedly listing his qualities. There is no doubt that Eden was in many ways an honourable and admirable ...”

“... been forced out of the country by the anti-semitic purges of 1968. Even this is ambiguous: she may have meant him to pass on her scathing comments about several Party figures, and he may even have agreed with her. But Domosławski is right to feel that Kapuściński was violating the moral and professional border of ...”

“... capacity to apprehend beauty was something in which we moderns could take pleasure. Ancient Greece may have been a high point in human history, Herder said, but it was not an absolute one. Greek art was part of its society and you could not, like Winckelmann, revive one part without the others. Hegel was making a similar point when he explained that there was ...”

“... the cause was the appalling American diet. Locating the national chronic malady in the stomach may, however, be an Anglo-Saxon trait. The national complaint of the Germans is Herzinsuffizienz and the French have the crise de foie, both conditions not easily translatable into Anglophone disease categories, though French medical writers often acknowledged a ...”

“... Great Tradition – based on articles that first appeared in Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make ...”

“... she gives us is a sort of sculpture in transition,’ Ernest Newman wrote – and may be more truly grouped with Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse (Duncan and Duse were close friends, possibly lovers). Certainly modern dance, which arguably begins with Duncan and is like a torch in the night, passing from one woman to another, has sometimes ...”

“... less as a deliberate attempt to shock than to show how down to earth these courtiers were. Or it may just be laziness, there being some skill in inventing euphemisms or devising elaborations that get round obscenity. Still, an enjoyable film, if an anachronistic one, e.g. ‘the opposition’ not a feature of Parliament in the 18th century.11 February. A ...”

“... Griaule, would cross the continent from west to east, setting out from Dakar, in Senegal, in May 1931 and heading home from Djibouti in February 1933. It was one of the great 20th-century outings, a royal progress by a scientific vanguard of white men, approved by a vote in the French parliament and funded by subscription: Raymond Roussel, the wealthy ...”

“... to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them’, it may sound like the usual, gendered fashion hyperbole, but I believe him. Those who admired his work as an observer of fashion – and he was much praised in the last years of his life – invariably emphasised his disregard for worldly pleasure. He had a spartan ...”

“... went on for two years after his illness. There were no more ‘natural’ cases and on 8 May 1980, Resolution WHA33.3 was signed at the eighth plenary meeting of the 33rd World Health Assembly. It declared that ‘the world and all its people’ had ‘won freedom from smallpox . . . which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South ...”

“... we last see her, she has hesitantly embarked on a career in television.) But while Frederica may have no intention of writing that ‘long novel by Proust out of George Eliot’, the long novels in which she figures are clearly marked by the genetic traces of that improbable couple – although their bloodlines have been hopelessly complicated by an ...”

“... word into Farsi, Kurdish and Turkish: ‘Strength to your arm, God be praised, long life to you, may you not be tired.’ I can’t explain this uniformity. I assume that blonde dolls may be popular as decoration because they are the only available legal depiction of unveiled women. (Though I’m not certain that the ...”

“... the extent of their mendacity only when she went out to Kenya to see and hear for herself. This may be part of the reason for the anger that suffuses her narrative, in contrast to Anderson’s more clinical, dispassionate tone. No one likes to be duped; on the other hand, there is much here to be angry about. Anderson focuses mainly on the trials of Mau Mau ...”