“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... sense of identity’, called Freud and the Non-European (2003). ‘Identity,’ we read there, ‘cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed.’ The context is Freud’s reminding us that Moses was an Egyptian.Edward was ...”

“... alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice. Dripping with froideur, an imperious Mandelson nailed the upstart coalitionists for their absurd sense of entitlement. Hannah Rothschild’s vanity promo, unaccountably offered to the ...”

“... the story, Hughes wrote a poem about his caller, and the following night the creature returned, read the new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... wanted to be God”.’ And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. When I first read Plath at 17, though I found the early poems hard to understand, and some of the later, fragmented ones too, I do remember the rush, feeling more than knowing that this was the real thing. ‘Daddy’ shouldn’t work: who could write a poem about fathers and ...”

“... up his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and ...”

“... he was rescued by the Cambridge lectures of Marxist Raymond Williams, who taught him not to read literature as if it were insulated from history. Old-style Marxists believed that economic reality was fundamental: from this causally sovereign infrastructure all the rest flowed. The picture might be blurred, by reference to Marx’s more liberal writings ...”

“... as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?For some people, the defining, moulding episode of this moribund century is the Final Solution; for others it is the Gulag, the 1989 revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the ...”

“... performance or a road accident. Nobody remembers whether they were actually there or whether they read about it later. Found objects, xeroxes of empty rooms in which nothing was about to happen, were part of the overall strategy. Much of which seems, in retrospect, designed for the promotion of the alien consciousness that is sometimes known as Stewart ...”

“... so, considering that not one in a thousand of his readers has any notion how his lines are to be read.’ In the wake of Coleridge’s enthusiasm Donne found a number of 19th-century admirers, but it was only in the late Victorian and Edwardian years that the taste for metaphysical difficulty began to flourish and that the modern surge of his popularity ...”

“... in a sense of the past in art and culture, not in dogma or military and state apparatuses. He read it as calling for an understanding of individuality as a process of becoming and therefore fluid. He also believed that poetry can have the metaphorical power to proclaim a visionary politics. The cycle represented for him an alternative history and ...”

“... that the children ‘had to go to matins and early mass, kiss the hands of priest and monks and read akathists’ – a series of prayers praising God. He and his brothers also sang in the choirs that his father, who learned to play the violin and paint icons, loved to direct – to the exhaustion of the participants. These activities provided Chekhov with ...”