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“... Michel Foucault up the wall. For all its carnivalesque cavortings, body talk is thus our latest brand of repression; and the Post-Modern cult of pleasure, not least in its Parisian variants, is a very solemn, high-toned affair. Either, like Peter Brooks in Body Work, you write about this bizarre stuff in an impeccably academic idiom, thus risking an ...”

“... principles, and from a distinct mental faculty, would be absurd; just as it would be absurd to brand knowledge of logic and mathematics as epistemically inferior to empirical knowledge simply because it is a priori. Idolatry of scientific knowledge stems from a defective and biased epistemology: indeed, science itself, particularly biology and cognitive ...”

“... is famous. But Searle is not offering us a new argument: rather, an old one, recently revived by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson. There is also a standard, devastating reply to it which has been in the undergraduate textbooks for a decade. On the most obvious and reasonable interpretation, to say that John’s mental states are subjective in character is just ...”

“... its ideological implications. After being in Germany for two months, Paul begins to find these ‘brand-new Germans’ who ‘worship their body as if it were a temple’ rather ‘ludicrous’. And why is it that the members of the German Youth movement contorting their bodies on the beach are ‘mostly middle-aged’? His dreams of the political ...”

“... was raised by Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State and owner of a large chunk of County Down, and Thomas Miller, Lord Justice Clerk and a custodian of the vast Sutherland estates. Both realised the reverse of the speculative impulses in the Americas: land without labour would produce no income. If people fled from rent-paying in Sutherland to rent-paying in ...”

“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not ...”

“... of an accurate chronometer, but was dependent on the Astronomer Royal, Dr Nevil Maskelyne’s brand-new Nautical Almanac, with its 90,000 observations of Moon and stars. Over the years, Maskelyne went through 25 assistants, demanding perfect accuracy for his far-fetched facts. Cook’s Endeavour was packed with the finest instruments of the day, made by ...”

“... before and turned down an opportunity to meet General Ludendorff. Others were also worried: Thomas Mann noted that while ‘Wagner will never cease to interest me . . . Bayreuth as it now presents itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great ...”

“... is the most ‘European’ of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small part ...”

“... a migration to other continents, and exponential growth globally. The second volume opens with Thomas Pavel’s thoughtful and informative ‘historical morphology’ of the novel, from Heliodorus to Kafka, which describes a ‘confluence’ of different sub-genres (chivalric romance, elegy, pastoral, picaresque, novella) in 18th-century Britain (and to a ...”

“... that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has learned a lot from Thomas Pynchon. He has learned, for example, the potentially disastrous lesson that it’s possible to write a novel of ideas that’s vast in scope and light, even jaunty, in tone – to write about physics and farting side by side, not just as an exercise in ...”

“... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...”

“... decides to postpone the decease by means of a magic amulet, which the dying woman, who has her own brand of wisdom and cunning, promptly swallows. She, Yente, our all-seeing eye, then enters the condition of the undead, her living corpse secretly transferred from one hiding place to another (one of them, a grotto and a place of pilgrimage, will later be ...”

“... Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was living well at the time on ‘Grandfather’s tick’, as he called his inheritance; but Linda was ‘rich-rich’. She was eight years older than him, with fabled taste and impeccable manners, and counted ...”

“... Charlie Chaplin, or even Mel Brooks. It was more the case, as MacDonald puts it, that ‘Bowie’s brand of fascism … was taken seriously by a certain hermetic compartment of his mind … The rest of him … was deeply uneasy about it.’ After the tour concluded in Paris later that May, Bowie retreated to the Château d’Hérouville, where he’d recorded ...”