“... away from the home of his children and his ex-wife?’ To those familiar with Lacan’s work, it may come as no surprise that he could be vexing and cocksure – a womaniser. But what A Father does reveal is Lacan’s avarice and his tendency to treat those of a lower social class – he referred to them as ‘subalterns’ – with contempt. He was rude to ...”

“... styptically called ‘the practitioner’, when writing criticism is that things said about others may be taken to be merely self-regarding, the regard being a squint or an oeillade. What Larkin says of Eliot – ‘one suspects in fact that his account of Marvell’s quality is to some extent a description of his own, or what he would like his own to ...”

“... features, and what he has said in earlier pages or volumes has to be recapitulated since it may now lie so far back along the trail. Both purposes are served by repeated perorations about LBJ forcing through the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which finally gave all blacks the vote, and about the canniness with which he foresaw Southern resistance in Congress ...”

“... that Delacroix’s portrait instead exhibits ‘some affinity’ with another painting – which may not be a genuine Goya and was not certainly known to Delacroix. Then there is the case of Degas, who painted Pagans, a Spanish tenor, playing the guitar. There is nothing obviously Spanish about the way it is painted, but Gary Tinterow, co-organiser of the ...”

“... and declarations of love and piety, Margaret Blagge eventually became Margaret Godolphin on 16 May 1675, in a marriage so secret that not even her platonic friend Evelyn was told about it until the following April. Even then it was not Margaret herself but her sister who let the news slip. Evelyn’s diary for the period during which her marriage was still ...”

“... passions of a distinctly non-Redmondite sort still to be found in the party. In a speech of 11 May 1916 he condemned the execution of the rebel leaders and the large number of often indiscriminate arrests carried out under martial law. They were damaging to British interests in Ireland: ‘If Ireland were governed by men out of Bedlam you could not pursue ...”

“... news that questions about belief might be questions about fathers, or that we have art so that we may not perish from the truth, or that perception is manipulated by wishing. What is news – and what makes Lunar Park so powerful and so poignant – is that fathers can destroy their sons’ capacity for belief in anything, that parents can make feeling alive ...”

“... or a vacuum cleaner. I just thought, if it’s a Picasso, you can’t go wrong.’ But it may have been a steal too far. The drawing had been verified by an art appraiser in Florida, and it came with a certificate of authenticity signed by Picasso’s daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso. When the Times contacted her, however, Picasso’s daughter promptly ...”

“... Orientalists do will seem quite dull to non-Orientalists.’ Their chronologies and catalogues may appear tedious, but that doesn’t mean that writing about them, too, has to be dry. Nor does it mean that they themselves were dull. Probably the most striking characteristic of Orientalists to emerge in these pages is how many of them were real oddballs, as ...”

“... French literary culture precipitated by the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and by the events of May 1968. As Barthes declared in 1977, these upheavals marked the final demise of the sacrosanct nationalist ‘myth’ of the Great Writer as ‘the sacred depository of all higher values’, and the equally powerful, sometimes rival, universalist ‘myth’ of ...”

“... The total tax dollars invested in poverty programmes in Swisher County, controversial though it may be, is dwarfed by the subsidies the county receives through various federal farm programmes. In 1999, farm subsidies totalled $28.7 million for Swisher County . . . which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout ...”

“... Martin was not only French, but had served as an officer in the French force at Pondicherry. In May 1760, he defected to the East India Company, and like Polier, wound up in Lucknow and in the service of the nawab. Again like Polier, he made a fortune: by 1800 he was worth over £400,000, and was probably the wealthiest European in India. Just as Polier had ...”

“... blank; Gardner just looks like a nice kid from North Carolina who’s got herself in trouble. She may in later life have been scary and fiery company, but she was just essentially too nice, and The Killers couldn’t avoid revealing it. Yet in one extraordinary moment she redeems the entire film. The scene begins like a thousand others. The noble hero at last ...”

“... Belgrade, one of the most popular of his dialogue operas. However insipid and one-dimensional we may find much of Salieri’s music, there is no doubting its contemporary appeal. Little was recorded about Salieri himself before his friend Mosel got to work. Michael Kelly evidently found him engaging; Lorenzo da Ponte thought him pompous. Into this void all ...”

“... affronted national pride: ‘The English like to think they like to laugh at themselves. This may have been true once when there was no apprehension that the Sun might one day Set. But it is not true today. The good ship Britannia is waterlogged in a shark-infested sea. Don’t rock the boat’. I think now, as I thought then, that this was well over the ...”