“... fighting about the nature of MPD has become a new way of fighting about psychoanalysis. We may be at the end of the Freudian century, but psychoanalytic concepts such as the dynamic unconscious have a powerful cultural presence. Is fighting over the nature of MPD – whether it is real or ‘constructed’ – one of the ways we are sorting out our ...”

“... greatest work with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of emotion. It is this delicacy that may finally convince us that we are in the presence of that rarest of achievements in art, the re-invention of sublimity. Bruno Walter once said to Thomas Mann, as they were walking home after Walter had conducted a performance of Tristan and Isolde: ‘That ...”

“... who had abolished the corset and introduced trousers for women) and Diaghilev were close. In May 1912, Fry held an exhibition of British Modernists – Vanessa Bell, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, himself, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and some others – at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, which was located on the ground floor of ...”

“... that Léon Delbecque was sent to Algiers, there to become the main mover behind the 13 May army coup. Not only that: Foccart stage-managed Operation Resurrection – the planned paratroop landing on Paris – as a way of coercing Fourth Republic politicians to vote de Gaulle back into power. Foccart was, in fact, the perfect homme de main. When ...”

“... There may be only two writers, currently at work in America, who can bring themselves, unblushing, to use the phrase ‘drinky poo’. Two Wodehousian renegades. One drops the words, like a pair of maraschino cherries, into his sunburst fiction. The other, a poet, whose work is his life, is happy to go either way: rhyme them or float them, with a winning question mark, at the conclusion of an in-your-face Greenwich Village monologue ...”

“... he projects his own unresolved conflicts about sex and the psyche. Thus we learn that Flournoy may have ‘failed to comprehend’ his own emotional transference onto Smith, or the manifold ways that he perhaps exploited her in his ambitious quest for knowledge. He sought to ‘taxonomise’ the ‘museum of all possible phenomena’ he found in ...”

“... She had believed that university would be an escape from provincial life. ‘Oxford I trust may lead to something,’ she had written in her diary, ‘but Buxton never will.’ It was a place where she hoped to do as men did, ‘no longer the angel set up on a pedestal, and shut out of everything, and no longer the toy, the sort of soft cushion or ...”

“... that is very well and so far there is nothing new: all the world has heard as much and people may believe or not as they think good.’ Is this casualness based on confidence that Mary knows the rumour to be false, or knows it to be true? Either seems possible. Physical lovers or not, what becomes clear, I think, is a sort of submarine constancy in ...”

“... shift, you weren’t fresh as a daisy. Indeed, there were times when it really got rough: the roof may have been fractured and unsafe, the cutter may not have done his job well, the borer might have drilled the holes at the wrong angle and the wrong depth, or too far apart, or the shotfirer mightn’t have stemmed the shots ...”

“... of the United States. Saddam Hussein should have been there. (Hampered by travel restrictions, he may have sent flowers.) All the other godfathers had seen the King as expendable at one time or another. The Saudis subverted his regime and stole his family title, Custodian of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Netanyahu’s people proposed overthrowing him ...”

“... excellent explanation at least for part of the difficulty. The trouble with the simple lyric poems may just be their extraordinary simplicity, and faced with the renowned ‘Über alien Gipfeln/Ist Ruh,’ Boyle just throws up his hands: ‘There is little sensible that literary criticism can say about something so delicate and so matchless.’ I’m sure this ...”

“... the Northern Hemisphere would benefit greatly from a thin Selected; but even his slackest failures may be the sorts of thing a poet has to risk to become as original a writer as he now is. He also writes strongly felt verse-essays, expository or polemical: their titles name their genre and topic (‘Second Essay on Interest: The Emu’). These poems often rely ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”

“... If we wait, we cannot build. If we break the law, we can. We decided to break the law. The regime may have boasted about the virtues of collectivised agriculture, but we have known for a long time that it was really the private plots that fed the country. Thanks to Fitzpatrick, we now know that ‘leaks’ in the urban economy ...”

“... the Liberation’ and that was useful too, although, as Aronson points out, not quite true. He may have contributed a few ‘stories about dogs run over in the street’ but he was never a ‘member’ of Combat or any other clandestine organisation. He conceded that he was more ‘a writer who resisted’ than a ‘resister who wrote’, but as Aronson ...”