“... people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay. He wrote to McGreevy to say that he did ‘not think there is a syllable that needs touching’ in the first 18 pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he ...”

“... Anderson, another critic complained, Cather’s fiction was ‘harmless stuff that “could be read in schools and women’s clubs”’. Her Flaubertian classicism (and concomitant moral irony) went mostly unrecognised, and despite her huge popularity with general readers – her 1931 novel Shadows on the Rock was the most widely ...”

“... developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect Russell, Ayer, Popper etc; he neglects very little. Indeed the quantity of material he doesn’t neglect is ...”

“... tournaments and the unromantic motives behind William’s quest for a rich wife. (Those who have read his article on ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, The Chivalrous Society, 1977, will find this part of the new book familiar.) One wonders whether Duby is right to insist that the life of knights was so different from that of the church clerks whom they ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... fortunes of evolutionary theory in the 1830s and 1840s, his densely-detailed narrative can also be read as a series of interrelated biographies – lives lived against a complex political and institutional background. Desmond’s argument is persuasive, and it can easily be extended, as he points out, in several directions. For example, in addition to offering ...”

“... an account of ‘the end of the brief era of dedicated Green national politics’ which cannot be read primarily as an exercise in historical explanation. Instead, it is a sharp polemic against Green parties and movements, developed by way of a genealogical history. Bramwell deploys a wide knowledge of contemporary thought and political life to give a ...”

“... still dressed in “couture” and the poor struggle along dismal pavements with little but C&A or Richard Shops to sustain them.’ The customers of C&A would surely be surprised to find themselves described as ‘the poor’ and most people expect to go along a pavement to get to the shops. Yet, despite her misplaced sympathy for the huddled masses in ...”

“... for books and articles accessed under ‘Nature’, it wouldn’t only be more refreshing to read, it would also be truer in its focus. His argument most often becomes threadbare when he has drawn only on ‘sources’ – not the wellsprings of rivers, but some book or other. In a chapter called ‘The World beyond Europe’ he puzzles over the lack of ...”

“... the advent of sustained war in and from the air. Edith Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’ and Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ overreach themselves in their attempts to find a rhetorical lift to match the fall of bombs. Keith Douglas was the best of the English Second World War poets because he managed to reconstitute traditional ...”

“... flashback – and, no doubt, the experience – can be, the puzzle is how poorly accounts of it read, and how little difference the terrific powers of LSD-25 made to the social history of the time. Leary turned himself into an evangelist of evolutionary transcendence, and seems doomed to replicate the serious-mindedness of evangelicism while churning out a ...”

“... tiresome 94-page preface to attacking writers such as Habermas, Ricoeur and George Klein, who read Freud as having begun a rigorous but not scientific approach to the mind. ‘Scientific’ has to bear a fairly complicated burden here. The emphasis in some of these writers is on the absence of anything like a relation of objective causality in their ...”

“... our ideas of the sexual. We do not just go to bed, Heath explains, with meretricious manuals: we read novels too. And there is a connection between the genres, not just a superficial connection, in novels where we are told how to do it in stories of other people doing it, but a connection in the idea of ‘the novelistic’ itself. The novelistic is the ...”

“... years of Field Marshal Lord Wavell, The Chief, is no exception. It would, indeed, be possible to read the book without ever being properly aware that the subject’s decisions involved the killing, maiming or imprisonment of thousands of men. But Mr Lewin’s book also suffers from a more pernicious shortcoming of the genre: the assumption that all ...”

“... got stuck in the allegedly golden years of good King Clem. Michael Foot – though, together with Richard Crossman, he was wrongly excluded from the Attlee Government – is one such. In consequence, Foot the politician is not fully integrated with Foot the man. Whereas the rest of Foot is clever, subtle, charming, broad-minded and living in the present, Foot ...”