“... bond with it. The US enjoins its newcomers to forget the past and embrace the American way; Canada may offer opportunity or refuge, but no obligatory national dream. Davies himself has been a kind of twice-born Canadian, familiar with the different states of being settled in one’s country, leaving it, and then choosing to return. He was born into the Ontario ...”

“... with a national past – both of which were stimulated by the emergencies of wartime – may have played in determining the unusually accessible nature of this sculpture is a task worthy of a sensitive and subtle historian. To assess how much of its appeal depends on the vulnerability of expression and tenderness of gesture – the former quality ...”

“... to by reviewers, with jokes, obscenities, fantasies, pseudo-scholarship. Foucault’s Pendulum may give the impression of being like that, but somehow triumphantly isn’t. For one thing, Eco’s scholarship (so far as I can guess) is real, however engagingly grotesque the uses he makes of it. We need a more seductive explanation, says Belbo at one ...”

“... In the essays local excellences often jostle for space with oracular utterances which may be commonplace or comic. Thus on Middlemarch she rewrites Wordsworth: ‘Defamiliarisation is a procedure of englamouring the humdrum.’ As it happens, the most successful essay is one which doesn’t really illustrate her thesis about non- or misreadings of ...”

“... To make so ill-considered a remark under the momentary influence of the crowd’s euphoria may not look like the tactics of a great media manipulator. But Chamberlain was already sensing the opposition to what he had done and the remark was the start of a losing struggle against it. For two years he had effectively stifled all divergent views on Europe ...”

“... encountered in the writing of the history of ideas are superbly controlled. (Similar praise may be given to the writings of J.W. Burrow, whose very different style of work in the history of the social sciences plays an important role in Stocking’s conceptualisation of his task.) The first is the use of a biographical mode of analysis, employed so that ...”

“... research strategies’ to reveal colonial anxieties and obsessions. His charges may be technically valid, but they are a little ungenerous. After all, Bailyn noted that what made the Revolution ‘so profoundly a transforming event’ was the ‘intimate relationship between Revolutionary thought and the circumstances of life in 18th-century ...”

“... up the last conversations or the last outbursts ... Unless already well-informed, the reader may be confused by the account of the crowded Cuban literary scene, with its fervours and feuds, its allegiances and animosities, though the cosmopolitanism and above all the passion for words come through clearly. The most touching passages in the book concern ...”

“... seen by the locum, claims that the wrong twin has been foisted on him back in Australia. This may sound like a farce, but the story is full of enigmatic subtleties, the whole brilliantly handled. There are skilful though lesser stories in Part Three, and the whole book has a nostalgic feeling for Wales emphasised by a few poems, some of which, like ...”

“... licence of imagination, is represented as a beginning. This changed relation of end and beginning may modify our assumptions of causality. The idea is to say something new about our world by defamiliarising it and imagining another one. The reading of such a book is an exercise in what we could, if we felt like it, call enantiomorphology. If one asks whether ...”

“... a mob. The coup, and the response to it, have so far been very civilised affairs: the brutality may come ...”

“... deep voice:    You will never grow old,    While there’s love in your heart,    Time may silver your dark brown hair,    As you dream in an old rocking chair ... She loved it when Gustad changed the song’s words from ‘golden hair’, always breaking into a big smile at the third line. Thereafter the plot becomes more and more ...”

“... fever, there were six children. The young widow took over his business; Toth argues that she may also have had an affair with a married roué, Albert Sampite, possibly the model for the seducers in her fiction. If so, it did not last long. In 1884, she returned to St Louis, and began to write. Her early magazine fiction was genteel and uplifting, but her ...”

“... was that the very first thing you should do when you see a tradition is to ask what relevance it may have today, to query it, to ask why, to wonder whether the good reasons of two centuries ago still apply now.’ Yes quite – and that no doubt is why the text tells us of the grandfathers, the uncle and the brother of the wife of one of his ...”

“... of comparative order and solitude. The Rockefeller Centre’s ‘superbly solemn buildings’ may evoke a sense of safety and authority, as Medieval churches did, but to Sennett the famous landmark is ‘an abscess in the city’, spiritually as well as spacially ‘divorced from the community’. The coldness and impersonality of the American urban scene ...”