“... there no great women artists?’ was first put to Linda Nochlin in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form ...”

“... of ‘the political history of forgetting’. Perhaps, after all, Nietzsche’s sallies should be read with a little more detachment than the scholars who have contributed to this volume could muster – with the sort of irony that speaks from Jacob Burckhardt’s letter of February 1874: ‘In thanking you very warmly, and having merely rushed through this ...”

“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with a civil defence warden cadging a light from a cab driver, followed by a shot of the statue of Richard I flourishing his sword outside the Houses of Parliament. It was a huge success, both in the States, where it was seen by Roosevelt at a private screening, and when later released in Britain. Heart of Britain followed, a montage which features the ...”

“... are packed with young people saying the rosary. It is true that a good many literary theorists read as though their work was composed by a computer as well as on one. Just as some doctors are always sick, so some critics can’t write. But it is too rarely pointed out that some of the most distinguished names in the field ...”

“... with profit and perhaps with gratitude, a poem by an inventive, a hugely fructifying writer widely read sixty or eighty years ago when Thurber was young, although out of fashion for at least the last half-century. Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ begins, with a fine surprising immediacy:That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were ...”

“... block as long as I’ve known it existed. It was partly the glamour of that myth that led me to read Beauvoir in the first place, working through both volumes of Le Deuxième Sexe at 21, leaving hopeful questions about the future in the margins: would it always be true that ‘men don’t like tomboys, or bluestockings, or clever women; too much ...”

“... way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.’Richard Holmes suspects that Tennyson was having a protracted nervous breakdown, whose immediate causes were not hard to discern. He had suspended his unofficial engagement to Emily Sellwood in the summer of 1840 after her father had finally forbidden the ...”

“... ago he was with a specialist trying to save the sight in his left eye; at the moment he can’t read. Every morning and evening he is on a drip. He refers to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... the young comrade in front of them was going to do much with the material – some Verso book read by a couple of thousand of the converted, perhaps. So Blears in 2011 sneers at the very concept of local government – she and other Blairites wouldn’t trust them ‘to wash the pots, let alone run a community’ – and then admits that ‘we should have ...”

“... is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and myths change with time. As the Lucan affair recedes to the horizon of living memory, revelations and theories once libellous are now printable, while first-hand recollections become clouded and the ...”

“... that one has AIDS may not lead to restraint: on the contrary, some AIDS patients, according to Richard Fisher, have described becoming reckless, through despair and a sense that there was now little to lose. ‘They throw themselves into sex,’ as he puts it, ‘in every bar, bath and cottage.’ The role of these bath-houses has been crucial in the ...”