“... and worries about struggles in his most private self that no one else will understand. This may seem at odds with the man who writes of his hunger for any sort of publicity, but throughout MacDiarmid’s career private anxieties and public pugnacity appear to have fuelled one another. The talented but vulnerable private individual could comfortably ...”

“... merged with the dictates of a Calvinism that Genovese finds appealing. The ethic of honour may have been an imperfect scheme for preserving social order, but it upheld most of those principles that Genovese most admires. A second lapse is Genovese’s underestimation of Southern Catholic intellectuality. To be sure, he discusses the affinity of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inappropriate because they were thought to be distasteful. In this case political squeamishness may have had a point: what was found objectionable might have increased prejudice against PWAs without making any difference to sexual behaviour. Garfield points to an analogous irony: homophobic Aids stories in the tabloid press ...”

“... same person.’ The words of Lady Bracknell, one of the wisest characters in English literature, may eventually be echoed by readers when and if they have worked their way through the four, totally diverse, biographies of Graham Greene which originally appeared in the summer and autumn of last year. The biographers are Norman Sherry, Anthony ...”

“... himself of this opinion as he returned to the company of Bronson Alcott and Jones Very. One may well feel that the defensive condescensions of provincialism could hardly go further. Clearly, Emerson was more at ease among the undemanding tranquillities of Concord than amid the provocative and turbulent stimulations of Europe. He lived on until ...”

“... for instance, is entirely understandable. It is possible, therefore, that Labour in government may behave differently from Labour in opposition – but at the moment I doubt it. The argument for rewriting Clause IV is by now well-known. The old Clause IV, it is said, might have been appropriate for the Britain of 1918 or 1945 but it was wholly ...”

“... in antique shops. But lack of supporting evidence gradually consigned it to parlour games (‘May I feel your bumps?’) and sideshows at the fair. By the time What Asylums Were, Are and Ought to Be was published in 1837, Browne was no longer relying on bumps to solve the insanity problem. It was an influential and idealistic book. The asylum that ought ...”

“... dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a trooper, soldiering on towards the day he would make a name for himself. ‘It was his audacity that endeared him to those people,’ he wrote in a school essay on the Dutch painter, Kees Van Dongen and the ...”

“... spokesman for Social Darwinism and the gospel of work, while Izabela, the aristocratic beauty who may or may not be the ‘doll’ of the title, is first seen reading a novel by Zola. Wokulski is in love with Izabela and gains considerable power over her, but, besides being a heartless flirt, she can never get over the fact ...”

“... how such a modern self as yourself was much less content to be nothing much. Sexual intercourse may have started in 1963, with the Beatles’ first LP and so on, but intercourse of many another sort was at the same time starting to stop. Drinking and dancing went on, but in a different way – the clubs stopped being places where young and old of a similar ...”

“... or ‘bread’ or ‘the hatred of town people for country people’. His main focus may be the 16th and 17th centuries, but he will turn back into the Middle Ages or project forward into the 19th century with no sense of incongruity if there’s any chance of enlisting material. Contemptuous of the pettifogging exactitudes of the historian ...”