“... come down like an iron cage), the freedom of discovery – sexuality, culture, ideas – and in a more subtle sense, perhaps, the freedom from nationality, from the guilt of class and of being an American. What the ‘real’ writer wants to write about is not that kind of free-floating freedom, but rather the realities of constraint (the campus novel has the ...”

“... of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a hundred pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that ...”

“... Swift (1752). ‘Being born amongst men and, of consequence, piqued by many and peevish at more, he has blasphemed a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest ...”

“... spy on oneself – and the delusion of drinking is that it can take the edge off reality, make it more bearable. Instead, as her study shows, it becomes a reality of its own. ‘Inspiration contained a death threat,’ Saul Bellow said in his introduction to John Berryman’s novel Recovery. ‘He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed ...”

“... swinging scenes, did some major acid, talked about the world. Shetzline had been a student with Thomas Pynchon at Cornell in the 1950s, and he gave me Pynchon’s address in Manhattan Beach. When I went down to visit my parents, I knocked on his door. I grew up on 32nd Street and Pynchon was living on 33rd. At first he was dismissive, even paranoid. ‘Are ...”

“... It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says. Or his good luck. At the end, he and his friend walk through a section of Kyoto wrecked by an out-of-control train – there was no engineering ...”

“... he wrote, ‘and that is, it pours Ideas into our Minds, Words only drop ’em.’ He taught Thomas Hudson, who in turn taught Joseph Wright of Derby and Joshua Reynolds. By the time of his death – suddenly, on sitting down in his chair after his usual morning walk – he owned ‘unspecified’ amounts of bank and South Sea stock, as well as five ...”

“... in Arabic, becomes ‘Forgeron’ or ‘Laforge’; another is to tweak it slightly, so it’s more recognisable to a French ear. If everyone in our family decided on the same French given name and clipped our surname, we could all become Françoise Hardy. For the moment we’re just migrants, watching the host culture with a wary eye, and listening to ...”

“... A contemporary catalogue suggested that it be put on a roller or made into a screen. (Today a more convenient version is available: The A to Z of Georgian London, published in 1982, reproduces the sheets, one to a spread, still perfectly legible, at a little over half-size.) To trace parts of London you know well in Pine’s neat engraving is to learn ...”

“... impressions which most of us have been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his most significant. Three of these impressions can be recorded as a measure of our distance. First, that he is one of the more interesting and tolerable Marxist critics of ...”

“... exactly the friend of sex, or of the sexually symbolic in art: our old friend equivocation is a more helpful companion here, and the paradox of the sexes’ divided response to the female form in allegory is faced by Marina Warner but not fully overcome: she has to seek refuge now and again in a tone less suited to the expert iconographer than to the ...”

“... they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was considering the dietary prohibitions in the Bible, he was puzzled that griffins were listed, commenting that griffins were ‘Poetical Animals, and things of no existence’. The combination of eagle and lion was, he wrote, ‘monstrous’ and ...”

“... attending the demonstration is the young Freud himself, fresh off the train from Vienna. And, more significant, while in Brouillet’s painting the audience’s eyes converge on a female subject who fully obeys the will of her Master, Huston also portrays a male patient, no less hysterical and suggestible than his female counterpart. This might seem ...”

“... French society lay behind the radical left’s hysterical demonisation of Marie-Antoinette, and, more broadly, behind the transition from a paternalistic monarchy to a fraternal republic. That book delved into 18th-century art and literature, gathering up representations of the family from diverse sources and showing how they fit into coherent patterns. In ...”