“... he has written a novel called The Memorial; lives with his mother and a younger brother called Richard; works on a movie; has fashionable but uncontroversial left-wing ideas (he speaks himself of his ‘parlour socialism’); confesses to small acts of cowardice. But we know far more about the quality of his attention to the world than we know about ...”

“... the biography of Rousseau – to immerse himself in the evidence, both personal and contextual, to read (and then largely to ignore) the secondary literature, and to allow his subject to emerge as naturally as possible from the background. The method works best with thinkers who have vivid personalities and much to say about themselves. Locke, one might have ...”

“... generated by political circumstance. J.G.A. Pocock established its parameters in 1973, in a paper read in New Zealand just after the UK had turned its back on the Commonwealth in order to join the EEC. With a chapter in the history of Empire ending, it seemed right to investigate how a dynamic state-system had established itself on the Atlantic archipelago ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... chord – onto a dominant seventh, itself a discord crying out for resolution. But we can also read this reluctance to resolve as the musical equivalent of staying awake: a bid to suspend the passage of time, in which sleep gratefully acquiesces.I am interested in the way we take in Wagner’s music, or the way it takes us in. In tonal music a final ...”

“... in the Times endorsed this verdict: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation.’ This time the complimentary comparison was with The Wind in the Willows. Children will be enchanted, but educated adult readers will appreciate the novel’s ...”

“... landscape that can be expressed as follows: if you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times. If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world (unless tinpot leftists wreck ...”

“... jokers trade in is much more volatile. It congratulates itself on an audience-defying perversity. Read the list of ingredients: argument, intelligence, spiteful syntax, information overload. A negative dialectic that can live uxoriously with itself, assertive in its modesty. Poetry. An embarrassing word. The project is anachronistic. Well-meaning (but ...”