“... Adam Smith’s picture of economic life to all of life, whatever the cause of this pattern may be; and the insight that the artist or the philosopher who thinks he is not pursuing bourgeois goals because he is not crassly pursuing money may still be acting like an entrepreneur is a disturbing one. I find it harder to ...”

“... and given to ‘voyeurism’ and even to ‘intellectual onanism’, whatever that may mean. The celibate clergy are described, without a hint of irony, as ‘phallocentric’. A reader does not have to be an apologist for the old regime, or even, for that matter, for the Church, to feel that Darmon’s moralising approach, much coarser as well ...”

“... reduced his scientific loyalties to mere lip service. ‘His mind,’ says Janet Oppenheim, ‘may have imagined itself at home in a scientist’s laboratory, but Myers’s heart always yearned for a church.’ Alfred Russel Wallace also was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, but he was even less affected by its scientific slant despite the ...”

“... some other party-guest is receiving the benefit of his subsequent revelations. Gerald’s Party may be fun to contemplate, but it is hell to read. Neither carnivalesque invention, half-hearted allegory nor literary parody can obscure the fact that this is a tediously over-inflated extravaganza, a funhouse both brutal and boring. The satirical intent and ...”

“... workings of government. It is amusing to find Crossman himself boswellised in these pages, as in May 1944: ‘Crossman says that he quite understands why so many civil servants, permanent and temporary, despise ministers and are always trying to do things which they think ought to be done, without letting ministers mow, for fear that they might try to stop ...”

“... that rivalry with his younger brother had been a serious problem from the start, that all may not have been well with his parents’ marriage, that he suffers from ‘not knowing how to value himself’, and that he now feels his childhood was not quite real. He castigates himself for his ‘habit of secretiveness’: ‘when you are not open with ...”

“... and so on. The effect is not unlike a Chinese Memoirs of Hadrian. At the end one may be uncertain whether the text is a novel or a history, whether the voice is that of the Emperor or his historian, but the author’s skill and perceptiveness are not in doubt. It is difficult to think of a study which better deserves the description ...”

“... ensured its defeat at the polls. The Wilson era ended, in a sense, not on 16 March 1976, but on 3 May 1979. It ended in failure. In Final Term, the man who led the Labour Party for 13 years, and presided over nearly nine years of British decline, offers no sort of analysis of what went wrong and no kind of theory about what might go right. The book, I am ...”

“... to the law of God, they were certainly very welcome. Whatever the term ‘secularisation’ may mean, it did not happen in 19th-century America, an age of enormous religious creativity and affirmation. The separation of church and state, in Virginia and most other States, did not remove religion from people’s daily lives. Indeed, because it allowed ...”

“... so much power and authority through modern technology. Not only in the Third World, of course: we may think of Irish bishops and the Polish Pope. A new cult among the Ivorians is called the Celestial Christians: they come from Ghana and have only been in the Ivory Coast for three years, so they are anxious to make their mark. Naipaul followed up one of their ...”

“... or two or three million seasonably adjusted, excluding school leavers’. Readers of this book may want to question whether the kinds of factor Brittan discusses as lying behind the rise in unemployment have changed sufficiently and are powerful enough to explain the vast deterioration in economic performance that has occurred all over the world since the ...”

“... is not to fall victim to an ahistorical taste for 19th-century art for art’s sake (whatever that may be): it is to acknowledge a historical situation. Although this art was produced at a particular time when knowledge was itself construed as pictorial in nature, the Dutch artist’s trust in representation has continued to play a central role in the Western ...”

“... snatching at social and sensual experience than ever before. On the famous day of Friday 13 May, 1785, he made love to a whore twice before breakfasting with the Quakeress Mary Knowles, went to a Quaker meeting, watched Lunardi go up in a balloon, visited the Bedlam hospital, dined with a famous lawyer, found himself dead drunk singing songs in St ...”

“... gone to Saudi Arabia, leaving a broken marriage behind? One or other of her conversation partners may be responsible. There are brief excursions from the central dialogues: one to the old lady’s husband, Robert, who hears a susurrus of women’s voices in his flat in Positano. Beneath the old woman’s bedroom, by a convex mirror (whose symbolism is ...”

“... suicide: he was killing himself in effigy. Nilsen’s desire to understand his own motives may be sincere – he has, after all, nothing left to lose. But his articulacy seems suspect. The danger that his crimes might mean nothing, might have no reason, seems to press on him more strongly than guilt; he is too anxious to secure an explanation; what ...”