“... can also be built with hypotheses that do not lead to the Keynesian result. Godley and Cripps may see their model as a ‘non-denominational’ model, but every monetarist or rational-expectationist is going to see it as a Keynesian economic model. Keynesian assumptions in; Keynesian results out. The point is that the existence of a financial sector does ...”

“... Instead, he conjectures that the preference given to fellow Masons in jobs and contracts may have developed informally outside the Lodge, and is no more sinister than an ‘unsystemised’ old-boy network. However, there might also be a historical explanation which Piatigorsky misses. John Brewer’s pioneering work on 18th-century commercialisation ...”

“... eye we open or what arrangement of lenses we peer through. That the provisionality of history may not be its problem and might be its point is a truth so widely acknowledged that (you might imagine) it can hardly stand telling again. But it’s the way he tells it: not as a theoretical piety or as a preamble to ignoring it, but by sketching ...”

“... publisher Gladys frères, which ‘specialised’ in sentimental erotic fiction. Even the title may well have been a joke at the expense of early readers who would have been expecting something more conventionally carnal for their 7.50 frs. Corbière, true to form, is missing from the Harvard New History of French Literature, but this official banishment ...”

“... very minor character ... has the right to live and breed’. It’s beautifully put, though it may have an ironic undertone (unlike actual democracies? Nabokov was not a great believer in democracy). Be that as it may, such ‘ordinary’ life can only be glimpsed in a Nabokov novel round the edge of the narrator’s ...”

“... tolerate no indecorum; we like that our matrons and girls should be pure.’ At times the magazine may have been little more than a mishmash of bad puns and column-fillers, but it was fit to admit into a middle-class home, even with all that snook-cocking. A hundred years later, when the paper was in the grip of an aloof priesthood, the motto was still ‘We ...”

“... between his sense of paternal responsibility and his own feckless parents’ lack of it. It may be just an accident of survival or typical of the reticences of the period, but the number of full and affectionate letters included in this volume which were written to Mamie and Georgina when Dickens was away from home contrasts strikingly with the absence ...”

“... giving offence to the populace’, they should ‘out of doors, speak with caution of what may be passing here’. To ‘the populace’, their researches seemed fearful, particularly because of their hunger for recently dead bodies. In 1871, John Hunter testified, as an expert witness in a trial, that he had dissected ‘some thousands’ of human ...”

“... analysed, reformed. Foucault’s sketch of what ecclesiastical savoir-pouvoir did to pleasure may, in one sense, be called ultra-conventional. As Peter Gay emphasised so well in his The Enlightenment, radical philosophes hated the Church above all for its sexual mutilation of mankind. Christian dirty-mindedness (Diderot has his wise Tahitian say) had ...”

“... up into a titanic figure, and then try to make a ‘human interest’ story out of him. This may or may not be credible, but I do not think it is very interesting. Was anything about Hubbard interesting, apart from his habit of staffing his ship with nymphets and having people who displeased him thrown into the ...”

“... to class her as what was then called a ‘psychopathological writer’ – with her older friend May Sinclair, who had organised London’s first medico-psychological clinic. The Return is the case-history of an officer invalided home from the trenches. He is an amnesiac who cannot react either to his wife or to the memory of his dead child. His only ...”

“... the Arbat, with their undisguised attacks on Stalinism, have already indicated the direction which may soon be taken by the Gorbachevite Communist leaders. Gorbachev’s own language has been curiously indirect. His speech to the January 1987 Plenum referred repeatedly to the years of ‘stagnancy’ under Brezhnev as being the product of social and political ...”

“... comma in Shakespeare’s 29th Sonnet. To point out that in fact it is a semicolon that is at stake may not entirely dispel the suspicions of lemon-squeezing pedantry which thus arise, but a reading of Barrell’s chapter on Shakespeare certainly does: he is one of those rare scholar-critics who can make matters of punctuation genuinely interesting. The ...”

“... Hawkins, and the striking, successful (and presumably slim) novelist, Emma Loy. These two women may seem to make one Muriel Spark. Mrs Spark, who has been a slimmer, has experienced the hallucinatory condition of Mrs Hawkins who, when she feels ‘faces looming’ on buses, thinks of Lucy Snowe and laudanum, and is ‘tempted to reflect that my diet had the ...”

“... images of ruin have come equally well from other origins (Great War, civil war, revolution) and may this not be more relevant, since the broken bridge and the cleft hill don’t belong at all to what was done to the crofting townships by the lairds’ thugs, nor do tiles, glass or china, none of which were in use there? But usually Marshall is relevant and ...”