“... a tree in bloom and birds screeching outside the window of my boardinghouse on the Aventino in May; in another part of Rome, a boardinghouse with a dark, frozen corridor like the hallway in my childhood home.Seeing her lover from a certain angle suddenly takes her back, only now with the thought that the dining-room table, ‘instead of being a thing of ...”

“... reject the easy joke; I was a tasteful person now, having passed through the refiner’s fire. 8 May. We had flown into LA from Savannah the night before; the city, from our hotel room, looked like a heat map of itself. The jacarandas were blooming. Everyone describes the jacarandas, but my husband, Jason, was seeing them for the first time, in that ...”

“... Its elliptic syntax and abrupt, verbless sentences often completely check the momentum. Yet this may well be its point. The decisive moment in the poem comes in stanza 30 when Bradstreet has now sooner invited consummation – ‘Kiss me’ – than dispatched it into the past – ‘That once.’ In the instant between these sentences Berryman is for the ...”

“... unique, and his dislike for his subject is apparent on every page. For the outsider the book may be a useful telling of the tale, well-written, coherent and combative, but it contains very little new information, and relies too heavily on a few secondary sources. Why did Haughey seek to import arms into Ireland and send them to the North in 1969? Bruce ...”

“... was either distanced to inaudibility or in danger of being crushed or forced into the street. This may have been due to defective vision. He was also obsessed with the directness of the route, which meant crossing busy roads at most awkward places. Seeing a car number-plate XYZ 729 he would point at the car and say, ‘There goes a perfect cube.’ In town he ...”

“... life was a function of the place of Jews in the educational system and liberal society.’ In what may claim to be the central passage of the book he concludes that Freud, the son of a merchant from Moravia who went on to read medicine, and his followers, ‘could hardly help being Jewish, for their career plan in the Viennese context was a Jewish one’. The ...”

“... mixture of political activism and technical experiment, the Pollock brothers joined his May Day workshop. Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now ...”

“... politics and the noticeable failure of those once singed by it to succeed, however much they may have tried, in escaping its implications. In the rush of confession, revision, repudiation, self-advancement and mere ageing that has overtaken the New York crowd, the idea of the fearless unpublished, unimpressed and uncompromised intelligence has taken ...”

“... to know at what point his early love of Firbank turned into ‘genuine piety’ (whatever that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This ...”

“... Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not longer, American colleges and universities were virtually built or shaped by strong-willed presidents backed by admiring, powerful lay boards of trustees into whose ...”

“... From 1988 to 1990 he was President of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, which may be a less grand assembly than it sounds. Final Exit is his ‘book for the Nineties’. Humphry targets his readership carefully. He distinguishes between what he calls ‘emotional’ and ‘rational’ suicide. His book has a covering note reminiscent of a ...”

“... Arthur at his Sheffield Camelot. Routledge was spurned in 1983; it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that the strike, far from representing an upsurge of working-class militancy, was ‘all about one man’ (as ...”

“... put ancient history on the map for modern historians, however cautious his Classical colleagues may be. But a good deal of the New History – particularly in the field of urban or regional history, for all the marvels of such tours de force as the two volumes on Birmingham by C. Gill and Asa Briggs – is strongly empirical and conforms more closely to ...”

“... a practice apart. This Bakhtin finds undemocratic, as if there were restrictions on what may be seen as ‘literary’. Anything in a language is ‘literary’ if it occurs in a literary work. So the ‘literary’ language is on absolutely equal terms with the ‘everyday’ language where both can be found to have entered literature. But the ...”

“... social explanation adds significantly to our understanding of the development of psychiatry: it may illuminate the byways of the field, but the main thoroughfare is amply charted by accounts of the progress of medical science. Roy Porter’s sensitivity to this problem is acute. He prefaces his piece on Samuel Johnson’s melancholy by insisting: ‘It is ...”