“... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...”

“... what he ate.’ It’s a scattershot complaint, but well made all the same. You don’t want to read a travel book which presses upon you, perversely, how much time the author has spent sitting in a chair reading – in which the principal journey has been made by fingers flicking through a library’s card index. Nor should travel writing approximate to an ...”

“... much exaggerated. He has therefore, against Shaw’s wishes, republished the lot, advising us to read with caution the praise of Sterndale Bennett and with disbelief one piece of anti-Wagnerism. His decision to do this seems partly to have rested on the fact that Shaw did not destroy these notices, which are now part of the Shaw Collection in the British ...”

“... of argument characteristic of the Continental tradition), Cavell suggests that Derrida has not read Austin with sufficient closeness. He furthermore suggests that Derrida’s evident lack of understanding may be traced to one of the few traits that his style of deconstruction has in common with A.J. Ayer’s brand of logical positivism: an irresistible ...”

“... like to be the poet my father reads.’ This can’t mean, ‘I’d like my father to read my poetry,’ since his father presumably did, whether he liked it or not. His mother certainly did, and didn’t like it, as Harrison tells us in other poems. It doesn’t mean: ‘I wish my father was someone different, the sort of person who reads ...”

“... Bernard Williams had a very large mind. To read these three posthumously published collections of essays (there will be a fourth, on opera) is an overwhelming reminder of his incandescent and all-consuming intelligence. He brought philosophical reflection to an opulent array of subjects, with more imagination and with greater cultural and historical understanding than anyone else of his time ...”

“... and true – inside the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face value. I ...”

“... and contentious ‘naturalism’ – and constitute a kind of fragmentary poetics by which we can read his fiction and verse. They also bear witness to a lifetime’s dedication to collecting morbid incongruities: a chicken’s roost under a gilt placard of the Lord’s Prayer, a dead baby on a doctor’s mantlepiece, a crucified Christ rising from a parterre ...”

“... was thus immense. Hurd found only one setting by Gurney of his own words, where the musician Richard Carder, searching the archive in 1993, found 16. And as recently as 1996 a letter was unearthed, there since the beginning, enclosing 13 hitherto unknown poems of 1919. The pattern Kavanagh contrived from ‘upwards of 1700 items of verse of all ...”

“... covered the floorboards. I offered him $1200 cash. He handed over a green plastic keychain that read ‘Laugh, live, love and be happy!’ and warned: ‘Don’t take it over 45 or it’ll throw a rod.’ A friend later explained: ‘That’s a polite way of saying the engine will explode.’ Having to drive slow, pleasingly to my mind, made fun of the two ...”

“... biography ever written, and I should know, because I am probably the only person ever to have read it twice – once because I wanted to know about Stock, and once in preparation for writing this review. It is boring on a heroic scale: excluding the appendices (which, being extracts from Beddoes’s writings, are not boring), it is 413 pages long, without ...”

“... red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.’ The American novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, who read that sentence at the age of 15, ‘was appropriately amazed’. He repeated the line to everybody who would listen. ‘There was no doubt about my opinion of such a remarkable and modern paragraph – I was convinced it was marvellous.’ Paul Sorrentino ...”

“... book on the Moonies is one of the most striking pieces of investigative writing that I have read for a long time. It tells the story of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it ...”

“... consequent faultline threatens to bring down the whole structure. Here’s the problem: you can read adaptationism as saying that environments select creatures for their fitness; or you can read it as saying that environments select traits for their fitness. It looks like the theory must be ...”

“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”