“... 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 ...”

“... too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John Murray’s ‘The Señor and the Celtic Cross’, which operate quite different ironies about the limits of civilised society. The latter story, told in a tormented parodic mélange of styles, recounts a ...”

“... is meant as a joke. 15 January. Go into the chemist in Camden High Street to find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorising the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying: ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole shop’s mine. It’s bought ...”

“... trauma of the plantation world that, as Blackburn observes, there was often a heavy surplus of young males in the servile population – in 19th-century Cuba, for instance, where proprietors always suspected their slaves of wanting to murder them and seize their women. For many reasons Britain is the country that matters most in the record, and it is ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... said about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. It wasn’t the oral sex with a young White House intern that they minded; it was that Clinton lied about it. This is what puritans sound like when they’re trying to be liberals. So what’s the big deal about hypocrisy? Why is it worse secretly to violate moral standards you say publicly you ...”

“... to detect this temporal exchange. When Nead describes Miss Havisham’s Satis House in David Lean’s adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) as a ‘Gothic bombsite’ – which it wasn’t – we are assured that it exhibits the ‘colour of the period’, which seems to mean low-key lighting, glutinous blackness and overwrought decor. Cinema is ...”

“... Theodora and attendants, from a sixth-century mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna David Potter’s contribution to the series is a life of the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian, who ruled the eastern Roman provinces from Constantinople for almost forty years. Justinian had been a soldier from Illyrian peasant ...”