“... ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout the party as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a ...”

“... person at the Sorbonne directs him to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. There he finds a young lecturer, Simon Herzog, teaching an introductory semiology course with examples from the James Bond films – material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his ...”

“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

“... tendencies. The academic careers to be built on theory had largely been built; the hardest-core young Derridean among our teachers later drifted off into management consultancy and wasn’t alone in doing so. And the French-style rhetorical flourishes that some of us were quite taken with didn’t always survive first contact with the actually existing ...”

“... in an earlier watercolour, they hold the instruments of Poetry, Painting and Music. No doubt the young women are taking their father’s narrative to heart, and in due course will rephrase it in terms appropriate to their arts: the lute and lyre are in the margins of the plate, ready to be strummed. But the first form of the story is visual: Job sits in a ...”

“... of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four. But, as sometimes happens, the changes on the surface ...”

“... punishment to one of reform. The report also recommended the development of the borstal system for young offenders and the improvement of prison educational facilities. The argument for reform, however, conflicted with ideas of female depravity. Were women truly accountable for their actions? Were they redeemable? Did they have ‘higher ...”

“... at Oxford in the early Seventies, and they acted as a kind of philosophical IQ test for the young philosophers of my generation. I well remember poring with tormented excitement over ‘Truth and Meaning’ and ‘Mental Events’, two of the most influential (and contested) articles of recent times. These cryptic texts gave the impression of well-honed ...”

“... one does not, from either of their books, quite end up feeling that one ‘knows’ Foucault. David Macey calls his book the Lives of Michel Foucault, remarking that Foucault ‘lived many lives, as an academic, as a political activist, as a child, and as a lover of men’. He thus tackles the business of getting to know Foucault in an ad hoc way, noting ...”

“... Child-Who-Was-Tired’, then, is really a palimpsest, not unlike the Picasso Head of a Young Man (1906), where the gouache is laid thickly over a Japanese wood-block print, but not so thickly that one cannot see lines of the original like folds in the paper – creating a visual effect analogous to papier-mâché, at a time when Picasso’s ...”

“... are addressed to a lover – an erotic patron. The fusion of the beloved and the patron in the young man of the Sonnets epitomises the theory that poetry is speech addressed to a single auditor. The plebeians are vulgar interlopers, who do not understand what Cinna is. For Middleton, that ‘golden age’ in which kings ‘hung jewels at the ear of every ...”

“... Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather less, in the way of personal detail, than the recent study by David Coombes. There is far less about Sayers’s marriage, for example; but we do not feel – at any rate, I did not feel – that this is a case of suppressio veri. More an exercise in getting things in perspective. Yes, Sayers was a vicar’s daughter who ...”

“... renaissance. Lean Tales bears witness to its health and energy. In one Gray story published here, young Alasdair’s journey of 1959 seems to anticipate Kelvin Walker’s. ‘A Report to the Trustees of the Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship’ presents impressions of London and points south to Gibraltar. As the train trundles out of Glasgow ...”

“... between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical ...”

“... In the 1979 end-of-year issue of the New Musical Express, then a key annual event for serious young men and women, Metal Box came second in the critics’ poll (the much more palatable Talking Heads came first). PiL, still in their early twenties, talked confidently about greater breakthroughs to come. ‘I’m not going to play anything that’s ever ...”