“... of race, which now seems so disreputable, just as it is pleasing to find that Benoist’s painting may have a relationship with the enlightened legislation of the French Revolution. But what matters more is that Cordier and Benoist, and, indeed, Reynolds, shared a view of African blacks as being in some sense closer to nature than European whites: not ...”

“... We need merely to observe that one and the same event can be described in these two ways. We may also, if we like, hold that mental descriptions are supervenient on physical descriptions, so that physical twins must also be mental twins: but this is an optional extra, in no way entailed by the thesis of anomalous monism. There are indeed two very ...”

“... we no longer admired. I really think that if a genius uses daguerreotype as it should be used, he may reach heights we have no idea of. Above all when you study these engravings, which have exhausted every painter’s admiration for them, you feel how right Poussin was to say: ‘set beside the classical artists Raphael is an ass.’ Up till now this ...”

“... intimacy of a kind – Foucault is intensely alive and present to us at these moments – and it may be as near as we shall ...”

“... criminals amaze us by their tact and good spirits, as well as by a general lack of brutality that may make us feel wistful. They had no rage to kill. Yet these were the scum and dregs that societies of improvers were anxious to purge from the body politic. The publicity given them in a new age of communication (which was also an aspect of the development of ...”

“... films, radio and television. Arabs in Morocco, on the one hand, Iraq, on the other, who may have very little in common, are likely to have had a lifetime of watching Egyptian films (or television serials) to connect them. Similarly, modern Arabic literature has spread out from Cairo since the beginning of the century; for years Mahfouz was a ...”

“... in the notes. This is a pity, since this drunk’s autobiography – offensive as its confessions may be – constitutes the main source we have for London’s first 15 years of life. The earliest letter the editors of this collection can turn up is from July 1896, and there is nothing substantial until the turn of the century, when London was 24. Working ...”

“... comfortably than when forced to ride bicycles or stand on their heads. More ambitious maîtres may decide that Il Barbiere di Siviglia would suddenly become relevant to alienated modern youth if the setting was transposed to a Chinese restaurant in Orpington, but their intentions will be thwarted by the masonic gesticulations of a cast quite unable to ...”

“... and ‘Les Beaux Draps’. There was a moment, after the war, when the virtues of Destouches may have saved Céline from suffering further for his trespasses: in 1951, when the charges of wartime collaboration against him were re-heard, the examining judge is said not to have realised, or to have been told, that the good doctor, against whom there was no ...”

“... as closely as budgerigars were watched down a coalmine. When they topple from the perch, it may already be too late to run for the lift-shaft. The sky will be transformed into an uncontained cloud of intelligence, the dream of a brain, a brain without a shell: shapeless shapes, impossible colours, the unimaginable imagined. It only begins with the ...”

“... is given over wholly to ‘The Favourite Vice of the 19th Chapter’ – smoking. Small as it may seem, this too has its wider significance. ‘No other popular amusement,’ Altick claims, ‘solitary or social, appears more often in Victorian fiction than smoking; and its chief instrument was the cigar, which was seen more frequently in those pages than ...”

“... is also impressed by multiples, and with the (unsubstantiated) evidence that there may be neurological correlates of the condition. Like many other people today, she wants to emphasise variety as opposed to the old shibboleth of unity – and that goes for the unity of the self, too, Braude takes her to put multiples at the end of a range of ...”

“... it is his business to record the fact of that recognition in any further metaphor that the reader may understand and apply.’ For the reader who might hesitate before the belief that it was possible to know the mind of God, there are many interesting episodes in the briskly-written Mind of the Maker about the minds of writers. There is ingenuity in the rigid ...”

“... but equally pervasive. Within the high bourgeois household, a new ideal of the nuclear family may have created new intimacies, but it certainly led to a new separateness from poor or demanding relatives. A new passion for sexual information and new strains of art and writing which catered to it seem to have tried the patience of moralists and the solidity ...”

“... as conscientiously as the hawks who descended on its favourite son. It seems these inventions may have been a reaction against the death of the other son, whom Elvis spoke to throughout his life and whose place his mother regularly set at the table. The Who provided unlimited material for gossip, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who graduated from ...”