“... 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 ...”

“... the state’s evidence, even though the trial is to be held behind closed doors, they have only to read the rest of the Italian press, where depositions from prosecution witnesses, including star ‘supergrasses’, are published verbatim, almost daily. Trial by gramophone, as after-dinner entertainment, is a new development in criminal justice. Possibly it is ...”

“... loved and protected. This is the privilege of my body which I must renounce. It’s impossible to read the story without speculating about the dizzying extremity of unselfishness that would dissolve all but an unseen core of personality. And that extremity is given visible form in the image of the fat, ugly women, agonised by vain love, vain sexual desire, as ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... in history to abide by his own teachings. Some 2500 years later, in 1975, the philosopher Peter Unger published a book called Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism, in which, at the stupendous length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the ...”

“... on the sacred in Zurburan’s painting, ‘would recognise what I’m talking about.’ As we read through the essays, this opposition comes to seem more rigid than rigorous. In the second essay painting and film are contrasted in terms I have already borrowed: films (Berger is here quoting Lucien Sève) ‘cling to the surface of things’, but painting ...”

“... she handed him back to the Danish navy. Soon afterwards Hans Jonathan met another enslaved man, Peter Samuel, and together they decided to petition for their freedom. Their ship’s captain, Steen Andersen Bille, who was also a privy councillor, met Prince Frederik, the de facto ruler of Denmark, on their behalf and procured a letter from him that stated ...”

“... No doubt many Conservatives in the country and some of the more naive MPs thought that what they read in the Times and Telegraph reflected genuine British Tory views. Regrettably, they did nothing of the sort. The Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who was an Australian and is now an American, was as always chiefly concerned with its proprietor’s economic ...”