“... which are represented as differences of value, but what do they amount to? They depend upon what may be another act of faith on Berger’s part: that he can tell the difference between the work a painting does and the work we do on it. The ‘beyond’ of the paintings he most admires is celebrated in a language of the spiritual and of the sacred; they ...”

“... of Nazism more clearly than some of the writers of the Seventies and Eighties. The misgivings one may have about Hitler and Stalin are on a different level. ‘Parallel lives’ are a notoriously difficult medium, used only infrequently since Plutarch, and more suited to a long essay than a volume of almost 1200 pages. Plutarch used this form to encourage his ...”

“... Arnaud refers vaguely to possible leprosy, elephantiasis or ‘granulatosis’, whatever that may be. He observes that it was probably not a venereal disease, but Chamfort and his friends evidently thought that it was, and he struck a new pose as a sensitive pessimist and misanthrope wounded by Cupid’s careless arrow. He did not exactly give up sex, but ...”

“... My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a frail reader trying to manage it in bed – but a remarkable narrative, animated by an enormous will to do justice to its continental subject. My First university job after graduating in New Zealand was a lectureship in Armidale on the northern ...”

“... which merit exploration for the light they throw on the history of the body, on the way we may change its history and hence change ourselves, and hence initiate further changes. But phrases such as ‘the 18th-century body’ or ‘the objectified body’ are as yet, save the mark, only figures of speech. They relate to perceptions, not functions, and ...”

“... and double-standardism of which Desowitz indicts the ‘lords of human kind’ in the North may be misguided: on one projection of the greenhouse effect, temperate climates will turn subtropical and the mosquito will be drawn into the British Isles with a future average temperature of 81.5 degrees F in London. Britain’s capital will in the foreseeable ...”

“... ground: he seems neither likely to win an election nor to be an adventurous prime minister. This may be a misreading of him. He clearly has not been helped by having to propound the quasi-Treasury view that John Smith imposed on him. This is bad luck – but his recent attempts to recover lost ground have not been convincing. Margaret Beckett, though she has ...”

“... it pay off comes from his harder-headed mother. As a provider, Dave is wayward. He gambles and may womanise – Donald discovers a suspicious photograph. Around 1937, he loses his business and the family has to move to a mean apartment on the Concourse. Edgar gradually comes to see through his father in an affectionate kind of way. Meanwhile the mother ...”

“... contemporary medical beliefs are rendered sound by a tactic which at times amounts to bullying. It may be the case, as he says, ‘that the entry of the chemical industry into the medicines trade has brought immense benefits in terms of lives saved and suffering,’ but it is brutal demagoguery to announce this as a truth which ‘nobody but a fool or a bigot ...”

“... genially delighted side of MacCaig’s poetic personality is one that many of his readers may wish he had cultivated more assiduously. It is this that lends distinction to poems that otherwise squander their energies in laborious, quasi-philosophical word-spinning. In ‘Rhu Mor’, for example, from the book Rings on a Tree (1968), the poet attempts ...”

“... items. Plenty left for me and the missus if you work for the Administration. Some people may not like it, but boy oh boy just look at this suit, man – Savile Row, Germiston. And these shoes – Italian, made in Boksburg. And this tie! Everything of the best.’ ‘Get on with it, man,’ I said. ‘Well, first there’s the whole business of ...”

“... and further in the labs, using mirrors in interiors to reflect sunlight as a sole source ... There may be a small queue of cinematographers shuffling forward now with hands raised to claim equal credit in these endeavours. What is true is that Almendros used the methods as thoroughly and successfully as anyone, and was bold about applying them in major ...”

“... house many spreading bottoms and stomachs clad in grey flannel or beige tweed, where legs may be seen protruding in maroon socks and ginger suede shoes, where shirts and blouses give off the dingy glare of nylon.’ Kitty develops a passion for a devious Christian history professor with a tragic romantic past. We watch her teaching, taking a class ...”

“... of a thing with itself is shown its original doubling.’ The ‘original doubling’ of what? May Wittgenstein be saved from such clarification! Too often Brand reads Wittgenstein exactly backwards. For example, Brand says: ‘One cannot speak without thinking and one cannot think without speaking. If I think, I am speaking internally.’ He cites ...”

“... Peacock was a cold and self-indulgent eccentric. Elusive and strange the handsome lover of women may have been in his meditations on ‘free love’, he was passionate, too, in his family affections. His parents lived apart, and, perhaps, in such a man the affections would be more powerful than the passions. He did not go to the university, and his ...”