“... last of the 19th-century great men’, but Debray will have none of it. Mitterrand himself may belong to the 19th century, he argues, but it’s more likely that de Gaulle ‘was really the first great man of the 21st century’. And his admiration does not stop there. There is the wonderful austerity of de Gaulle’s refusal to pander to the ...”

“... If I had to make such a choice I suppose I’d help university students.     Brown: May God forgive you. The vote went 11-10 in favour of postponement for two years. Since this would ensure fresh cohorts of the underprivileged for Jennie Lee’s new Open University to recruit, one could argue that Brown set up a false opposition. But nothing ...”

“... read one of Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical illusions, there are two things which we may not find it easy to hold together in our minds simultaneously, his success in dispelling them and the depth and difficulty of the problems that produced them.’ In this second volume of a formidable two-volume study, Pears tries to provide access to ...”

“... moment in the 18th century when Anglo-French relations reached their lowest point was probably 29 May 1794 – 10 Prairial, Year II, as the French then styled it. On that day, the Jacobin Bertrand Barère delivered a typically long-winded and overheated speech to France’s National Convention on his favourite subject, English perfidy. He accused English ...”

“... Honan’s answer to all these questions, rather disappointingly, is yes and no. However he may disparage the format of the merely documentary life, his confidence seems to fail him when the gaps in the written record leave him with only his own conjectures to fall back on. Far from arguing for a single vision of William Shakespeare consistent with all ...”

“... into the dementia that swallowed him for the last five years of his life, was his own epitaph. In May 1740 he made his will, fastidiously apportioning his property and specifying arrangements for his interment. He stipulated that he be buried ‘as privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s ...”

“... will they. So all they can do is to rally behind the man Yeltsin nominates as his successor, who may or may not be Stepashin, and hope that the same tide of money and media manipulation which returned Yeltsin for his second term in 1996 will carry a man whom few know or care about, and wash him into the Kremlin. Except for ...”

“... the little bit of dry wood melted to dust. Disappointed, I clutched the two bronze teeth, which may survive somewhere in a drawer in my parents’ cottage a few miles away in Narin. Another day when we were out in that scooped windblown dune, a friend of my mother’s uncovered a beautiful bronze pin with a little circle at the top. Being a good Southern ...”

“... over their clever and dutiful sons. This is often a hope, however unwitting, that the son may not resemble the father. Seepersad Naipaul, who had published his stories privately, writes several times to his son that he believes the son will become a great writer; for himself, all he hopes is that he might one day be reputably published by an English ...”

“... the morning. The youth, however, drugs the queen, slays the eunuch and departs in triumph. Thomas may have his own esoteric reasons for arranging this dénouement, but on the face of it nothing could better illustrate Pushkin’s implicit contrast between banality of theme and banality of treatment. No situation can be too banal to provoke and intrigue the ...”

“... makes Basilius irresponsible. Sometimes Norbrooke’s valuable insistence on political content may be taken too far. In the ‘Jocabethan’ admiration for the republican constitution of Venice he finds another key to the conservatism of Jonson, who ‘pointedly set Volpone in the mercantile republic of Venice, and showed that its vaunted claims for ...”

“... its meaning, if not always in its intent, its role in the total picture. But the fastidious reader may find the manner somewhat too unbuttoned, the register too colloquial. He could point, in evidence, to such sentences as ‘De Sade invented libertine heroes who used their passionate stick whenever it could be set aflame’ or to the translation of Ernst ...”

“... be as secure as ever, especially within and radiating out from academic circles: that is, if one may judge by the number of recent books, articles, monographs, studies, memoirs and so on listed in the Bibliography and Notes of this impressively thorough record of the life and work of one of the most disconcerting novelists in the history of fiction, whom ...”

“... she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for the florid sentence, as a kind of revenge for the interruption of his linguistic training. Thomas was henceforth cast from tutor to tutor, and his only consolation was that he had made ...”

“... like to know? He hasn’t a drop of love for his children, for me, or for anyone but himself. I may be a heathen, but I love the children, and unfortunately I still love him too, cold Christian that he is, and now my heart is torn in two with doubts: should I go to Moscow or not? How can I possibly please everyone? Because as God is my witness I am happy ...”