“... turns at looking after their father, thus enabling Beatrice to resume her work in London. By May 1888, happiness was no longer ‘a closed book’. She even writes of days which had ‘been very happy, full of interest and blessed with content’. Her work was now ‘all in all’ to her. Even Chamberlain’s eventual marriage to an American girl was ...”

“... ideology, erecting itself into a criterion by which the nobility itself could be judged. (‘You may be a lord, but I am afraid you will never be a gentleman.’) It was at the same moment that, as William Empson has described, a new direction was given to gentlemanliness by Fielding, both in the person of Squire Western and in his own life-history. The ...”

“... of these texts is that mankind deserves extermination, and they are wholesale extensions of what may once have been the satirist’s principal urge and perhaps his magical power: to kill his enemies or, in the sublimated version, to punish the world’s malefactors. There is a de- (or pre-) sublimated version, in which extermination proceeds at the mere whim ...”

“... concern is the first reason why we read him, why he is part of the modern canon. To say all this may be obvious, no more than a first move toward understanding and interpretation, but it is at least that. Mme Robert, however, is not interested in the broad human significance of Kafka’s work, if only because in her view the work consists of nothing but ...”

“... and episcopal apparatus of the Church. The Archbishop clearly thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on ...”

“... in bandages, thereby disguising himself for the benefit of the pilot – hardly accustomed, one may suppose, to seeing his fellow Monegasques similarly attired when they have dental troubles. The fugitive was subsequently said to have been seen in the Caracoles restaurant in Barcelona, at the Plaza Hotel in Montevideo, and at the Cistercian monastery of ...”

“... in his way. Certain kinds of evidence will be wilfully denied him, certain other kinds may be offered too profusely or inaccurately. The exact nature of these difficulties will vary with the biographer and with the subject. Why is a particular biography written? Is the pop star or the footballer being promoted by an advertising man or denigrated by ...”

“... On their account, he withdrew his money and the film collapsed before a frame had been shot. He may have saved his family from the poorhouse by doing so, for Polanski, like the seven hammerlocking dwarfs, was a spectacular overspender. But Polanski is also, to invent a word, a grand overqualifier. He cannot help making films which are not only more ...”

“... Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any worthwhile thinking so long as you burden yourself with such a thing. I infer from Inglis’s reference to ‘the chic notation of the Parisian deconstructionists’ and from a footnote citing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... littered with the technical terminology of ‘careful’ ancient history: ‘presumably’, ‘one may readily postulate’, ‘the odds are that’, ‘it is no more than a guess’, ‘no doubt’, ‘in all likelihood’, ‘on this hypothesis’. Such phrases occur literally hundreds of times throughout the book. The problem with this method is not its ...”

“... have intended individuals to fill up any particular station in which accidents of birth or fortune may have flung them.’ But it also accounts for his insistence on his wife’s retirement. A gentleman did not allow his wife to sing for money. And as it was impossible to be a public man without being a gentleman, ‘he could only move onto the public stage if ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Laing’s theory and his own life’s progress, my reasoning on the basis of what I read may not have been too far off the mark. It may even have been that Ronnie Laing, romancer of madness, suffered from the same problem as me. According to Charles Rycroft, who was his training analyst, he had ‘an extremely ...”

“... who came their way provide a Rorschach test of settler attitudes to Africans. Ethnopsychiatry may tell us very little about the mental life of Africans, mad or sane, but it reveals a good deal about the attitudes and the lives of the colonials. McCulloch has studied the records of the Mathari Mental Hospital, built in 1910, in Nairobi, which had ...”