“... into the history of economic thought, it was Marx who made it famous. As the literary historian Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, there were good materialist reasons for this. Living in penurious exile in London during the 1850s and 1860s, Marx often had to hock his greatcoat for cash when his credit with the greengrocer ran out. In February 1852 he wrote ...”

“... and said that without factor concentrates, quality of life would be ‘much poorer’ for many. Dr Peter Jones, director of Newcastle’s haemophilia centre, complained to the Press Council that the Mail on Sunday’s piece was ‘sensational and highly exaggerated’, and had led to haemophilia centres being ‘inundated with calls from worried ...”

“... infinity. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The central ideas are laughable and garnished with reading which, in other Bellow novels, might generate strenuous discussion, but here amounts to little more than perfunctory citations from a Russian literature binge. Kenneth Trachtenberg, the narrator, teaches Russian literature – hence the garland of dusty ...”

“... the giant panda of Sichuan Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its ...”

“... way to Buckingham Palace, she decided to write Speaking for Myself. I can’t help feeling, after reading 400-odd pages of her memoir, that I still haven’t heard her real voice. A pity, since she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new evidence of sexual hedonism in practice, especially in the record of one joyously sensual upper-middle-class threesome living in the Connecticut Valley at the height of Victorian ...”

“... think that he could refute scepticism. On this last point he disagreed with Kant (on one natural reading of him), and agreed with Heidegger. The former thought it ‘a scandal to philosophy ... that the existence of things outside us ... must be accepted merely on faith, and that if any one sees fit to doubt their existence we are unable to counter his ...”

“... dome, finding solace in its proportions. (In much the same way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem ...”

“... all these Vs: against! against! against! Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke.It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did –butcher, publican and baker. Me, I’ll croakdoing t’same nowt ah do now as a kid. ’ard birth ah wor, mi mam says, almost killed’er.Death after life on t‘dole won’t seem as ’ard!Look at this ...”

“... superficial chapter. The text and pictures are separated, which does not make for easy reading, and the epilogue is placed at the front of the book, before the main text even begins. This may be a Lutyens-like joke: but such lack of concern for proportion and arrangement seems peculiarly out of place, given the subject of the book. Most of the ...”

“... half-dozen really distinguished musical works, Motion would hardly have a book at all. Even when reading about Constant’s development and interaction with the great (Diaghilev, the Sitwells), one is often keener to learn of the luck his rival and friend William Walton was having. Walton’s history lurks in the shadows of the Lambertian narrative, and his ...”

“... all should be scandalously expensive – forgetting that if it is a book it should also be worth reading. At £25 this is a pocket-popper in quite the wrong sense. A major part of the Postscript is devoted to a defence of no less than three kinds of indeterminism. Space forbids a proper discussion of them here, but since Roger Sperry’s book, Science and ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”