“... the Whitney, with a note stating: ‘Since I took the trouble of having a photostat made of it, it may indicate that I am not so modest as I am said to be.’ Writing to Flexner himself, Hopper dismissed the interpretation and told the astonished critic that the painting depicted ‘a tuberculosis sanatorium’. The Hoppers had read The Magic Mountain with ...”

“... and endorsed by James’s fellow contributors. Among the other pieces in the first number were Richard Le Gallienne’s torrid, gothic poem ‘Tree-Worship’ (‘With loving cheek pressed close against thy horny breast,/I hear the roar of sap’); Max Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’ (‘Artifice must queen it once more in the town … If men are ...”

“... criticism nowadays knows that the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected – for instance, in the case of Huckleberry Finn – of masking a racist bias. Booth does not admit a racist bias in the invoking of academic norms, but he is convinced that the peremptory dismissal of Moses’ challenge to a canonical work ...”

“... his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the fortieth.After the Restoration in May 1660, the signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this ...”

“... parenthetical) passage, Dennett sort of ‘fesses up to this: ‘hard determinists . . . may find in subsequent chapters that [their] considered view is that whereas free will – as [they] understand the term – truly doesn’t exist, something rather like free will does exist, and it’s just what the doctor ordered for shoring up your moral ...”

“... defined and applied to which different philosophers respond in mutually irreconcilable ways. They may agree that liberty of conscience is a basic entitlement in a just society, while conceding that there are some creeds whose behavioural expression a just, or even minimally decent, society would be bound to outlaw. But in a multicultural society, there ...”

“... Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare State’. This ‘crisis’ – the quotation-marks are to ...”

“... entirely wrong to regard Gash, Tory or not, as a narrow historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof ...”

“... chapter. However, later remarks in unconnected conversations have given me to think that there may have been a deeper motive: as an avowed homosexualist with an extensive and curious knowledge of medical/military affairs in Cairo in the First World War, Monck (and not alone in that generation) had some kind of needle about the virtual sanctification of ...”

“... town would have brought Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to mind. Now, the novel’s appeal may have more to do with our conflicting feelings about the trial and how it should have been conducted. In Guterson there are no lecherous journalists chasing exclusives or high-powered lawyers negotiating film rights. The sessions do not take place under the ...”

“... say, ten thousand years, too short a time for any transitional stages to show up as fossils – may stay the same for five to ten million years after that. The process by which a new species is formed is apparently too fast to show up in the fossil record, but too slow to be observed in human experience. ‘No utterly convincing case of true speciation ...”

“... zero tolerance or homeland security, Ferguson’s description of the American way of condemnation may offer some useful pointers to this country’s future. When it comes to the ‘war on terror’, however, Ferguson is reticent. The subject is given less than a page, and though he allows that prosecuting terrorists is important, he makes the puzzling claim ...”

“... in the unclean process, and pulls about the encrusted carcase with a fervour of purpose which may be scientific, but which is nonetheless nasty in the extreme.’ As Luckhurst observes, ‘this report would surely have suggested that Pettigrew was cursed, if such an idea had been available.’ Something must have happened, then, between Pettigrew’s ...”

“... very well done by Anthony Veiller for the Siodmak movie, with uncredited help from John Huston and Richard Brooks. The Siegel film, written by Gene Coon, borrows the plot from the first but transposes scenes and careers: New Jersey, Philadelphia and boxing become Miami, California and car-racing. The stars change too: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner become John ...”

“... comprehension of what, musically speaking, had been going on. He recounted that Decca’s A&R man, Richard Rowe (who was to become twice famous, once for signing the Rolling Stones and once for turning down the Beatles),made a number of journeys to Scotland in the years following 1950 and became impressed with the financial advantages which might accrue from ...”