“... illustrating just how politically and aesthetically diverse its contributors often were. Herbert Read, its most frequent book reviewer, was a Surrealist and anarcho-syndicalist educated in a Halifax orphanage, whereas the debonair dilettante Bonamy Dobrée, an odd compound of Strachey and Kipling, bellettrist frivolity and public school backbone, was ...”

“... Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that a suffocating blanket of prudery had for nearly a century characterised ‘Victorian’ England – France, too, for that matter. Mason agrees that, as ...”

“... well-bred Minister of State, Alan Clark, tastefully described as Bongo Bongo Land. They should read this, from Kochan and Whittington’s little book: ‘BCCI made hay out of the London connection. Arabs from the newly-enriched Gulf States came to the UK to enjoy the casinos, buy property, educate their children, shop and race their horses, and they banked ...”

“... with the support and editorial expertise of her friend Emily Coleman, who made sure T.S. Eliot read the manuscript. Though Eliot admired and published Nightwood, he wasn’t such a fan of Barnes’s poetry. A couple of years after Nightwood was published, Barnes showed him some poems she had written. He threatened to give her a black eye if she wrote any ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... academic research to assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions ...”

“... own account, Irina was born a nonconformist – even sympathising with the Russian equivalent of Peter Rabbit. As soon as she was old enough to count the change, she went out with the other children to stand in the bread queues. At school they had sums to work out, showing how much the State spent on each of them: why was the State so stingy? It was a ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... Manning inclines to the Tawney side of the debate, though not uncritically, for he has obviously read and assimilated most of the huge body of literature which has accumulated on this subject since Tawney. And in the modern way, he sometimes tends to invoke local differences – one thing here, another thing there – as a way of straddling fences. Manning ...”

“... as the emergence of a dynamic reformist leadership in 1985 did. Though perhaps not if they read The Gorbachev Phenomenon – the most illuminating study of the origins and nature of perestroika to have appeared. As the subtitle indicates, the book’s perspective is historical; it is, moreover, confined neither to the last decade or two, nor to the ...”

“... gaunt, hairy-bodied and bony-headed, middle-aged man narcissising in the nude is creepy. One can read Stipe-the-starveling in different ways. He likes enigma. Is he bisexual? interviewers ask. No, he replies, he is ‘sexual’. A gifted mimic, physically and vocally, he can change himself with chameleon facility – ‘I can be whatever you want,’ he has ...”

“... the right to criticise Tennyson’s poetry, even to fall asleep when ‘The Princess’ was being read to him. Tennyson was far from pleased. Fitz, clearly, tried at friendship too hard. He valued it passionately; Martin’s title, from Shakespeare’s sonnet, suggests particularly well how possessed he was by it and how he valued it as a possession. This is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I do not suppose one could reasonably expect this academic study to be a more entertaining read, though one feels at times that the author has deliberately driven all the political and industrial excitement out of his narrative. He also tends to be repetitive, in an attempt to bludgeon home a few general truths about the wider relationship between ...”

“... and solemn nonsense’ are however assailed, reasonably enough, in the persons of directors like Peter Brook and John Barton whose productions are determined by Kott’s or some other’s attempts to find in Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this ...”