“... sharp reference to ‘the vague and wild politics which have brought him so much money’ may have contained a misplaced insinuation as to motive, but it hit on one of the forms of insecurity which underlay Parnell’s landlordly anti-landlordism. It may also subliminally have referred to the role of Willie’s wife ...”

“... it – has been noticeably on the wane within the academy for a couple of decades now, but Lewis may just have cottoned onto a possible means of prolonging it. Liberal humanist criticism, in other words, might take on a new lease of life if it could only motivate itself to stake a claim in the field of British popular culture, where there are not only ...”

“... more likely that she does not think ahead from sex to procreation ... How intelligent a woman is may interact with her impulsiveness ... The result is a direct and strong relationship between ... low intelligence and the likelihood that the child will be born out of wedlock.’ (My dots of omission indicate I’ve left out the converse statements about ...”

“... and whom she sees in the supremely sensual act of performing the mass. Such observations may bring Flaubertian cynicism to mind, but Eça’s characters, unlike Flaubert’s, taste the bitterness of genuine self-knowledge – though they soon forget the taste again. In the agony of his eventual separation from Amelia, Amaro sets out to write her a ...”

“... culture-reading, however. Calvet is offhand when it comes to determining what his contribution may have been to literary theory (‘too early to say’ etc), and because Calvet is also sparing in analysing the great many ideas there are to be found in the critical books and essays, the literary as opposed to the semiological Barthes gets short ...”

“... his time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border.” ’ Though the artist may appear to engage with the quotidian and the circumstantial, these involvements are only false fronts masking a supreme detachment; the true writer ‘never participates in anything; his pretences at it are mimetic.’ Such comments – made in a letter of ...”

“... best friend ‘buying a jade leather coat just to match the jade line on her new car’. One may think of it as a return to the spirit of Versailles in more ways than one, but the writer felt that it demonstrated a new ‘ordered scheme of fitness’ in design – and it was undoubtedly typical of what the French understood as Modernism. The garden ...”

“... Lowry one is never far away from the thought that although there is an illness there may also be a cure.’ They obtruded and impended like the gods in the life of a Greek, but when it came down to it, they remained offstage, sat on their hands, and he gave his life to their absence. He is the one whom the gods did not save. Despite the offer ...”

“... never writes with an eye to the things that are best left unsaid, even if, like Little Hans, one may think them. She will tell you, for example, that poverty in Zimbabwe is better ‘in this sunlight, this beauty, than let’s say, Bradford or Leeds’. Or she will chart a course for treacherous subjects like aid, muddy the waters with a few contentious ...”

“... recognise the radical sophistication of their poetry. ‘Tennyson is another poet whose poems may be put before “virginibus puerisque”,’ an anonymous advice book of 1881 confidently assured its readers, before going on to issue the usual warnings against Richardson and Smollett. For Sarah Stickney Ellis, poetry was particularly suited to women ...”

“... and the anguish of such art is that it can never be quite identical with itself, that while it may strive to reconcile its various elements, it also knows that any such utopian resolution, in a history which includes Auschwitz, must be an insulting illusion. Modern art turns its back on society, and this refusal to have any truck with a degraded human ...”

“... you see it landing heads, that a second coin in London is landing tails. Paradoxical though this may be, it is accepted by almost every physicist. What distinguishes Bohm and Hiley is their eagerness to use it as a reason for speaking of ‘non-local’ influences: influences that help to pull the universe into a single whole. Themes like these are woven ...”

“... this view in 1859, declaring in the penultimate paragraph of On the Origin of Species: ‘We may look with some confidence to a secure future ... As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.’ Increasingly, however, Darwin and his followers came to ...”

“... could then buy enough shares in the market to get control that way (the rule being that a predator may not buy in the market at anything above his own bid). But then, I said, what happens if the whole market takes a nose-dive and our shares and the predator’s both plunge by 30 per cent? Oh in that case, I was told, every one of your shareholders will be ...”

“... Creoles had access to the highest positions except that of viceroy. This dispersal of power may account for New Spain’s remarkable tolerance of personal aberrations – so long as the basic principles of the established order were not called into question. Juana’s bastardy was no impediment to her acceptance at court. Her mother had six children by ...”