“... intensely affectionate relationships with young women. Ferguson suggests that the closest of these may have been with a maid, Lina Jacobsen, who, he reported, ‘sees to my needs with the greatest solicitation’. Jacobsen left behind no clues as to her views of her crusty employer, but the 27-year-old Emilie Bardach did, and Robert Ferguson has found her ...”

“... to the artist’s feelings or fantasies about particular women or woman in general. Picasso may be unremittingly macho in his life, but in his work, with rare exceptions, as in the period in the Thirties when he was obsessed with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter, his visual construction of gender is interestingly ambiguous. Throughout the time ...”

“... of its own dynamic or the causes of its own crises’. While the turn to ‘British history’ may be motivated by waning English confidence, however, many Irish and Scottish historians interpret it as a form of intellectual colonialism. Having dismantled Whig and Marxist explanations of political change in England, revisionists like Conrad Russell make ...”

“... of material, and much of it is worded in religious terms. Some part of this conscious emphasis may come from the fact that it is particularly in Dissent that their families are located, and Dissent was very much aware of being ‘different from them’ and even more intent on religious observance. God’s concern in every detail of human life was used to ...”

“... Those of us who have been victims of overbooking and who, like Maxwell, suspected sharp practice may be tempted to cheer. A few pages on, the temptation subsides as we find him in New York releasing a box of giant fleas (mysteriously obtained from a health institute) in the lift-shaft of a hotel which did not meet his standards and which then had to be ...”

“... the US Marine headquarters overnight on 22-23 October after attending a pop concert. These points may seem trivial, but inattention to detail has been one of the most salient and devastating features of US policy in the Middle East – as Mr Bradlee’s book makes clear. It was not really surprising that North and his colleagues in Washington sometimes seemed ...”

“... with an infant daughter. As Clarke plausibly surmises, on the night of her apparition she may well have been flying from some more predatory – or at least more brutally predatory – man. Wilkie evidently consoled her, seduced her and set her up with her little Harriet in lodgings. Meanwhile he continued living with his mother for a year or two ...”

“... This collection of essays is undeniably a book for academic inmates (if the race of lexicographers may be so described), with a content that only occasionally extends a broad appeal to the friendly layman. Its editor, the distinguished Dr Burchfield, describes it as being ‘Mainly concerned with large historical, period, or regional dictionaries, including ...”

“... argument and not to accept any particular substantive position. But this is vague and weak, and may well fail to distinguish the real philosophers from the ‘mere intellectuals’ who, according to Bloom, have been usurping their role. To avoid this difficulty, Bloom betrays his own philosophic principles. In the battle between reason and community, he ...”

“... radical tradition, and often represents it effectively. Yet, however little many of its members may be affected by them, it cannot, by the very existence of its socialist label, entirely extricate itself from that colossal wrong turning in the intellectual history of Europe which is represented by the body of ideas associated with Karl Marx. Over the past ...”

“... story. The professor finally dies, agonisingly, of muscular dystrophy, Lou Gehrig’s disease. It may, or may not, bring the sisters together. The story is told, with studious off-handness, by the least-regarded member of the Schwarz family: Suzy, the younger, duller and constantly out-rivalled sibling. Even before birth ...”

“... was the best poem he wrote, and modern criticism is just beginning uneasily to wonder if he may not have been right. Scott had made his fortune out of poetry even before he began writing novels, and a Keats cast in Leigh Hunt’s mould might eventually have followed him, making a trinity with Mrs Radcliffe. For it was ‘Mother Radcliffe’ whom Keats ...”

“... own suggestion that ‘to give it a more modern air, the title of Belles Lettres might be added’ may support Robert Burns’s acidulous verdict that ‘Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of what industry and application can do,’ and ill-tempered shades more recently departed would surely agree. But others in this volume and elsewhere are at pains to ...”

“... Prize dinner in Stockholm in 1978 the vegetarian Singer ate artichoke bottoms and avocado: ‘he may have been on a green diet but he hadn’t stopped drinking blood,’ Saul Bellow said recalling the occasion. The epithets women use are ‘capricious’, ‘captivating’ and ‘childlike’. Singer had a harem of translators, admirers, groupies and ...”

“... Sometimes Mullis says the creative spirit came on an evening in April of 1983, sometimes in May. Anyway, the buckeyes were in bloom; Mullis’s little silver Honda Civic was purring through the vineyards and redwoods of the Anderson Valley; and his mind wandered. Life is sweet, he thought: ‘I am a big kid with a new car and a full tank of gas. I have ...”