“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... wry, informed and deliberately informal, could agree to collaborate on it, and make it worth reading. Together, the two Irish writers connect Heaney’s poems with the people, places, books and songs that he has known.Songs matter more than you might think; so do some places, especially California, and so, by the end, do the mixed blessings of fame. The ...”

“... contact with another. He evolved from that sense of dislocation his theory of ‘contrapuntal’ reading, put forward in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an ...”

“... is erratically revived: ‘He went home and spent the remainder of the day eating, sleeping, reading, vilifying his children and practising desultorily on the French horn.’ Later in the same book, Frequent Hearses, Fen laments the arrival of the long vacation because there will be no demands on his time. The happily married detective is a dull ...”

“... of early 1960s London. Maverick, ambitious and something of a fantasist, he was a co-owner with Peter Cook of Private Eye and the Establishment Club in Soho. He was also a habitué of John Aspinall’s gambling club, the Clermont, which became the fulcrum of Lucan’s life after he left the bank. When Lucan disappeared the ‘Clermont set’ loomed large in ...”

“... of Pervitin in the Blitzkrieg; he cites and quotes the work of historians such as Werner Pieper, Peter Steinkamp and Karl-Heinz Frieser. Blitzed adds some new and valuable archival detail but Ohler’s most original contribution is stylistic: he puts Pervitin at the centre of the narrative and the way he talks about it draws on the sensibilities of today’s ...”

“... Hall). Although there have been some nuanced treatments of Basaglia’s work (for example, in Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics), the perception of him in British psychiatry was predominantly formed by hostile assessments that emerged in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll’s The ...”

“... welcome, but liable to sink if they take on all exceptions to their rule. Inspired by their reading of social anthropology, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas explained the increase in accusations of witchcraft in early modern England as a result of late 16th-century social and economic change. Steadily, though, incongruent cases gathered in drifts, even ...”

“... pretends to a mysterious ‘chain’ in Les Lettres Persanes, not immediately visible to the naked reading eye, they create their own continuity out of a tone, a set of shared assumptions, a manner of proceeding. For the Tatler’s sun, like that of Heraclitus, had to be relit each morning, or rather every other morning. We read on, sensing the passage of ...”

“... Rubinstein needs strong evidence to deny that Britain’s was ‘the first industrial economy’ (Peter Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or ...”

“... strengthened by the intrusive editing of his book: not only do hosts of square brackets check the reading eye but the narrative is continually interrupted by pieces that give the historical context and often a summary of what is to come, thus both confusing the reader’s chronology and giving him a wearisome sense of repetition. The book that follows is a ...”

“... indirect commodity taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ...”

“... figure of W.K. Wimsatt (still remembered in Oxford for his way of stalking through the Upper Reading Room in the Bodleian Library and stooping over the reserve counter in order to pick up ten books in either acromegalic hand). From this formalism he was rescued by the Cambridge lectures of Marxist Raymond Williams, who taught him not to read literature ...”

“... talking, about speech I mean, he’s actually not so very good at dialogue (not when you think of Peter McDougall or Roddy Doyle). It’s the way people talk to themselves that he gets so brilliantly, so matchlessly. While the peripheral characters in his stories often exchange words in a pretty featureless manner, his central characters have always had a ...”

“... the deadening effect of Soviet-style historical materialism by a more imaginative and selective reading of the texts: this was the milieu in which Finley received his early training, when employed at Columbia from 1937 to 1939 by the Institut in exile. This eclecticism of his has since led him into fierce controversies with orthodox Marxists in Italy and ...”