“... only to an enlightened elite who can be trusted to manage the affairs of the unenlightened. This may be what underlies the most striking feature of Schultz’s view of Sidgwick. For all his sympathy with much, perhaps most, of Sidgwick’s concerns and anxieties, Schultz very much dislikes the taken-for-granted imperialism and (on Schultz’s view at ...”

“... for his father, a cobbler and smallholder. He published Ploughman and Other Poems in 1936 and in May 1937 moved to London, where he was commissioned to write an autobiography, The Green Fool. The book was well received, though a disparaging remark in it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s ...”

“... flavour, but one easier to recognise than to describe. It also takes some getting used to, which may be why, I suppose, de Bernières had to wait until his fourth novel to become widely popular. I reviewed his first three novels for this journal, nine years ago, and recall my own bafflement. Take the opening paragraph of his first novel, and imagine coming ...”

“... saw them again. To confront an empty space, where there were people the last time you looked, may make you think very concretely about negation. Writing in the aftermath of the Nazi death camps, at a time when the bonds of human philia had broken down, Celan commemorates the lost gestures of a spent world, a world of severed relationships. He does so in a ...”

“... real talent was as a novelist. Travel writing is, after all, travel writing, and though Craig may think well enough of it, Fontane’s historical books were the work of an especially perceptive and knowledgable amateur. The theatre reviews, too, are witty and thoughtful, but not extraordinary. (Lessing’s criticism, as Craig concedes, is a cut above ...”

“... and ‘The holy hush of ancient sacrifice’). The plots scan also. One suspects that there may be some significance in the fact that there are 64 chapters, or stories, in The Devil’s Larder – there are, after all, 64 squares on a chessboard. Such compositional self-consciousness would certainly suit Crace’s constitution of mind. The various parts ...”

“... The narrator remembers his own flights from home, and fantasises about the dreams of freedom Dora may have had, ‘the illusion that the passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you’. But of course these are his thoughts, and he knows nothing of what Dora felt. He also knows, or ...”

“... also to be prepared to assert that my elephant is coloured. One is a reason for the other. It may also happen that someone calls on me to justify – to give a reason for – my original assertion. If I can show that I am entitled to the commitment I have undertaken, I come to have a further normative status. Successful communication requires that we all ...”

“... after having talked for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself came to prefer the term ‘cultural poetics’, but ...”

“... world dominated by power, against which prudence and a ready wit seem the best defence. He may have been working within a popular tradition, but La Fontaine confronts issues as grave as those raised by tragedy: there is more cruelty and death in his fables than in all the plays of Corneille and Racine. His insight into human drives and his meditation ...”

“... disappointed and eternally fretting’. Labels like ‘virago’ and ‘termagant’ may say as much about contemporary gender expectations as they do about the Duchess, but they are not inaccurate. Of the deadly sins she could be acquitted only of sloth. Her lesbianism is unproven mainly because she derived more pleasure from her ...”

“... Even the much praised roof was in a sense wrong-headed – a brilliant design executed in what may have been the wrong material. In reminiscences of the early 1930s, Arup describes meeting ‘a number of young people who really were interested in new ideas’, who ‘were in love with an architectural style, with the aesthetic feel of the kind of building ...”

“... we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger.’ As a child he had been educated largely by an aged clerical tutor, the beloved Abbé le Sueur, and, though he encountered the children of the bourgeoisie at a lycée in Metz when he was 16, he spent less than ...”

“... keep his private life, if he has one, secret. But he has also done something that, for a writer, may be even more remarkable: created a career impervious to narrative. His first novels, V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1967), were cult books that went on to become contemporary classics, and his extraordinary reputation, at least among nerds and ...”

“... the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys Kinnock, say, with Beatrice Webb and Margaret Cole, both of whom were serious intellectuals, and I can’t get used to the idea of a pantheon that includes Cherie ...”