“... the mark my way,’ he says: be buggered if I won’t & I know I’ll be damned if I do, for it may not be Lake poetry or Ovid or that damned dwarf Pope but it will be the best I can do and like no other has. Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation and reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults ...”

“... complain also, on national grounds, of an unjustifiable want of candour . . . Mr Laplace may walk about and even dance, as much as he pleases, in the flowery regions of algebra, without exciting our smiles.’ Laplace’s cunning analysis of probability allowed reliable calculations to be made about the outcome of games of chance, and was then ...”

“... BC Athenian grave relief doing set into the wall of the tavern? Learned as their research may be, this is off-the-peg, Ikea antiquity, often misleadingly – even uncomprehendingly – applied. One response to such carping is obvious enough. This is cinema, not archaeology. Part of the fun (and the point) of the screen is that it can play fast and ...”

“... of students ‘never attended chapel and went to church only about five times between November and May’. Colleges acted in loco parentis: female students were still required to sign out of their dormitories as recently as the 1960s, noting where and with whom they were going, and to observe curfews. Rules designed to minimise sexual goings-on were in place ...”

“... was a Jew: his dislike of Berthold Lubetkin, his neighbour in Paris and fellow émigré to London, may have had roots in professional jealousy, but it was intensified by the knowledge that Lubetkin had continually dissembled about his Jewish background, even to his own family. Work began to come in: commissions for schools, offices and housing, as well as the ...”

“... of ‘quasi self-defence’ (with the doctors acting on Gracie’s behalf). Rosie, he wrote, ‘may have a right to life, but she has little right to be alive. She is alive because and only because, to put it bluntly, but nonetheless accurately, she sucks the lifeblood of [Gracie] and she sucks the lifeblood out of [Gracie] . . . If [Gracie] could speak she ...”

“... them: Frank would have had a hard time keeping the heir to Marple Hall in line. Oedipal gratitude may account for Isherwood’s later attachment to Berlin and young Germans of military age. With his father dead, his mother, Kathleen, became the focus of his youthful repudiations. His break for freedom was devastating for the family members he left ...”

“... I did it, I’d say to myself: “Margaret, you must learn to keep your mouth shut.”’ Robert may be a genius, and is egged on by his admiring parents, but no five-year-old can actually do this kind of thing. And I was never sure that St Aubyn could see how repellent this awful little MacArthur Fellow is. Of course, part of the point is that Robert has ...”

“... offered Cannadine carte blanche to examine every scrap of paper in the family archives, there may not have been much material there. Andrew Mellon was reticent in the extreme. He had no way with words, written or spoken, and little intellectual curiosity. Unlike his father, he did not write an autobiography. Assistants produced the books, articles and ...”

“... impression that they are being given the first-hand view of an observer-cum-potential victim, who may not have understood all he saw, but who tried to describe it as he saw and experienced it. The result, as Neil Whitehead points out in his sometimes opaque introduction, is a unique document among European accounts of life among the indigenous peoples of the ...”

“... is one in which the money is earned rather than borrowed, and spent rather than saved. Keynes may have overdone this argument, which was associated with ‘left’ Keynesians in America and his younger followers here, but it has obvious force. The trouble is that such a redistribution is almost unimaginable, given that income inequalities are central to ...”

“... she can now go back, what was home has vanished. Like the hero of another Russian fairy tale, she may well say: ‘I will go I know not where; I will bring back I know not what.’ In an article on Ugrešić and one of her sister witches, Slavenka Drakulic, Sanja Bahun (also Yugoslav-born) discusses the dilemma of Yugo-stalgia for writers in their ...”

“... Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old charge’s head), or Augustine (Charcot’s ‘model patient’, whose much publicised poses taught a generation of mental patients and filmmakers what hysteria should ...”

“... disenchanted. One might be willing to acccept the mundane consequentialism he despised: there may be no transcendental justification for how we should act, but there are variable quantities of wellbeing in society, and we can occupy ourselves in engineering more of it. Or one might rejoice in radical subjectivities: if there are no longer any foundations ...”

“... to the capitalist West.) The specific cause of his disenchantment is initially unclear. (It may be that he came to Canada not by choice but because it was the easiest place for a war-blasted refugee to seek asylum – that at any rate is how it seems in the earlier novel.) Our first, dutifully liberal impression is a familiar one: it’s the ...”