“... example to enthusiastic religious groups, or to wayward individuals, served certain purposes. That Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was, as Johnson thought, magisterial, and unread. Above all, that madness was proximate to Reason, indeed twinned to the idea of ‘Reason’, and that madness was the secret history of the Enlightenment, its exhausted ...”

“... Parliament Trust have done less to write the history of Parliament than to prove that its history may be too complex and amorphous to write at all. Ironically perhaps, the fact that several of these familiar reservations apply to the new four-volume The House of Commons, 1386-1421 does not detract at all from its resounding success. In the first place, as ...”

“... caused the current fad; though as it happens there is new research showing that the crucial factor may not be red wine per se but the fact that the French eat a highly varied diet, and routinely consume food from all four main food groups. In other words, the next red-hot piece of dietic advice is likely to be eat lots of everything. Remember where you read it ...”

“... in books about composers – for human interest is easily assimilated by the non-musician. It may be considered more useful than German (and hence American) scholarship, but it can hardly be denied that it does not make for good historical writing. The Cambridge Music Guide is an obvious offshoot of the English school, and a rather old-fashioned example ...”

“... to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear. Found in the Street is her exact territory; she patrols these Greenwich Village streets as if from a ...”

“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”

“... it, waiting for Jelal and Rüya to return, and carries on the daily column in Jela’s name. Jelal may have good reasons for lying low. He is an essayist and storyteller rather than a political journalist – which is hardly surprising in a country where, then and now, authors can face imprisonment for exercising their right to political ...”

“... on South Island. The stamp bears two strikes of the Picton cancellation of 21 March 1904, which may have served to disguise its rare quality. Where it went then is a mystery. The package and its address have not survived but perhaps it had the distinction of travelling in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine ...”

“... performing their parts; but the possessed priests were genuinely beside themselves. Dog’s Dick may have started as a joke, but by the time he inhabited Father Tranquille he was as authentic as a demon can be. This is the story of Loudun. We already know it, for Aldous Huxley, writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun ...”

“... venerated antiquity and suggests a promise (however empty) of social benefit. Whatever Versailles may not have been, it certainly was a public building, a stage set for the sovereign to play the spectacle of power.’ But the same could be said of the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who aim to draw businessmen and tourists by the jet-load to witness the ...”

“... life, and this seems correct. They provide the most sustained theme in his variegated career, and may be seen as a point of convergence for most of the tendencies of his mind. To consider the computers is to consider Babbage. Indeed his story falls under a triple rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The ...”

“... that provide clues and proceed, with varying degrees of caution, to do some invention. The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention ...”

“... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...”

“... of his life’s work, inextricable from his larger concerns about history, culture and economics. Robert Casillo is therefore entirely correct to say that Pound’s writing raises ‘the problem of evil in literature’ in an especially clear way. ‘For it must be emphasised that Pound’s anti-semitism is quite different from Dostoyevsky’s and ...”

“... I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.’ Mandela may be released soon. If so, a new biography, with his full co-operation, may be possible. Fatima Meer’s book is full of interest, but it is not worthy of the man: it stops and starts several times, is full of gaps and ...”