“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, as well as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Two decades later, the question shaped Chomsky’s response to the ...”

“... to two Angolan women called Esperance and Brancke; Bastiaan Ferdinando of São Tomé (an island held by the Portuguese in the Gulf of Guinea) to Maria Bastiaans from Angola. Serafina and Bastiaan witnessed the marriage of Anthony from Angola to Leonora Fonçeka of Brazil. Soon, the children of these unions began to appear in the baptismal records of the ...”

“... satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s account of her life is in tune with the ...”

“... For years, the historical society responsible for the site quibbled with local activists who held that it was important to memorialise the fact that Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved woman forced to work for Washington, had lived there too, and to let people visit her quarters. The President’s House is a mile north-east of the former Frederick Douglass ...”

“... that they would be allowed to leave the Great Bitter Lake and were anxious that they might be held to ransom indefinitely by the Egyptian government.They were right to worry. There was a precedent for seafarers being made legally responsible for their ships and detained. Just fifty miles away, Muhammad Aisha, a Syrian seafarer, was being forced to remain ...”

“... preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared they would become ‘other-directed’ conformists, incapable of the generosity, independence and energy that democratic government required. In England, Tocqueville’s work was ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... whose recent work is shown to supports hers are Marc Shell, Kurt Heinzelman, Jerome Christensen, David Simpson, Heather Glen, Paul Magnuson, Lucy Newlyn, Raimonda Modiano and Alan Liu. Titles which reflect their common interests include Heinzelman’s The Economics of Literature and Modiano’s ‘The Ethics of Gift Exchange and Literary Ownership’. To ...”

“... Bob,’ mutters a member of the Band just before the music crashes sublimely in. It is a generally held truth among Dylan admirers that no one writes well about him, though the flow of articles and books is almost unceasing. The selective bibliography at the back of The Dylan Companion runs to almost twenty dense pages. Expositions of Dylan’s life and work ...”

“... as heat is of flame, whiteness of snow.This last lecture was introduced by the theologian David Tracy, who talked briefly about Derrida’s influence on Christian, Jewish and Buddhist studies. During the applause, a balding, young man made his way to the stage carrying an enormous potted plant, which he presented to Derrida. While the man said he was ...”

“... his feelings. It is a curious point of coincidence between Glasser and Gage that they both held their fathers responsible for their mothers’ deaths: Glasser’s from cancer, Gage’s by a Greek Communist partisan firing-squad. Both fathers were gamblers, losers, who, in their only sons’ eyes, had sacrificed their wives to the card table. When they ...”

“... practicality of the genre to which the novel isn’t quite conforming; the danger of cliché is held off by the current of fresh thought Auster applies to an action that in summary might start by sounding overfamiliar. Nashe’s sensibility remains at an ironic distance from the hardball motions he lets himself be caught up in: ‘Nashe understood that he ...”

“... of breaking with it.’ The father arranged for the bar-mitzvah of Joshua, their eldest son, to be held not in a synagogue but at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but he was quite strict about what women mustn’t do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords ...”

“... than Norris believes, or hopes. It is true that Derrida in a recent question-and-answer session held in Oxford maintained, if my information is correct, that Deconstruction was emphatically not dissolution but analysis, and this fits well with Norris’s own contention, in a recent lecture in the same city, that Derrida is really an unusually meticulous ...”