“... been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the case – and it may well be – it is a very serious state of affairs. Sampson, of course, wrote his book principally to do what he is so good at: putting ...”

“... Life: A User’s Manual is an exception, though it has clearly taxed the ingenuity of David Bellos. A chapter of humorous visiting-cards, for example, produces only one instantly cross-cultural item (‘Madeleine Proust: “Souvenirs” ’ – not one of Perec’s subtlest efforts). Luckily there are occasions when a bon mot in French can be ...”

“... this book, although it is central to Thomson’s development. The problem facing Thomson scholars may be that he left no clear account of the role religion played in his stylistic conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in ...”

“... mid-century decades of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the wars of Prussian expansion that David French picks up the story. It was evident to the more thoughtful that army and society were not well related to one another, and that the British army, which remained, to an alarming degree, a body apart, contrasted painfully with the efficient citizen ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... beloved ‘the only disciple of philosophy among all the girls of our age’. Heloise? Abelard? David Luscombe, in his magisterial new edition of the canonical letters, is inclined to say no. Teachers of this era, he notes, commonly exchanged flirtatious letters with their female students; it was an accepted way of teaching Latin rhetoric. Yet the tone of ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... history of modern ideas about man. Foucault II is a ‘microphysicist of power’ who, after May 1968, examined modern techniques of social control. Foucault III undertook a comparative study of the pagan morality of the Greeks and Christian morality, with the aim of clarifying our own moral assumptions. The stage we seem to be reaching now is Foucault ...”

“... What distinguishes Perloff’s neo-modernists, as a class, from Yeats or Hollander or Muldoon may have less to do with what her writers put in than with what they appear to leave out: story, persona, scene. Her programme favours what Bernstein calls ‘anti-absorption’: this work will not let you get lost in it, will not let you even pretend that you ...”

“... in autobiography; it positively ‘encapsulates rather than . . . qualifies its meaning’, as David Vincent has put it. However, it’s still possible to plot the degrees to which it was allowed to flourish in the FWP biographies. This is how Mary Hicks introduces her interview with Betty Cofer, a former slave of a plantation-owning family, in North ...”

“... found as early as Dante), or even a set of seven couplets. Within each of these variations there may be further variations: do the quatrains hide a couplet within them (abba) or do they make up a couplet of rhymes (abab)? Should ‘a’ and ‘b’ rhymes dominate the octave, or can ‘c’ and ‘d’ jostle their way in too? The sonnet is a toolkit for ...”

“... true to his promise that he would move there in October 1883 ‘in whatever condition the premises may be’. One party of casual passers-by, seeing workmen and open doors, took a look inside and were surprised to find Gilbert in residence. Contemporary photographs show dark, elaborate interiors in which dramatist and architect (Harold Peto took 7 Collingham ...”

“... loudspeakers on the underside of the aircraft, through which might emerge’, according to David Pascoe, ‘passages from Memories of Lenin, interspersed with exhortations about the Five-Year Plan’. Eighty red lights on the fuselage allowed it to flash slogans to the remotest regions as it swooped across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner ...”

“... it is right to report angry comments made by a colleague about a third person – comments which may have been regretted as soon as made. Should I, for example, now report comments made to me about Barbara by people who, to judge from this book, she thought were her admirers? After all, perhaps they were her admirers, despite momentary irritation. Barbara ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”