“... bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my superannuated years,’ Styron muses in Selected Letters, edited by his widow with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. The irony of Styron’s career is that as a literary son of Faulkner, Wolfe and Hemingway, he expended massive energy and ...”

“... diver after all’s Done, still held fast in the weeds’ snare below ... My sudden struggle may have dragged down some White lily from the air – and now the fishes come. Meyers argues that the 20-year-old Frost chose the Dismal Swamp because other poets had written about it, and that Frost intended only to make a dramatic point to Elinor by ...”

“... Revolutionary empire’ is a bold term which may be taken in various senses. Like the Roman and Arab before it, but on a grander scale, the British Empire was a powerful force in drawing peoples out of their separate existences, pulling the world together into one jarring and explosive whole. Its expansion had transforming effects on Britain itself, and through it on Europe ...”

“... an autobiography, or as giving the whole story. Regard it as pointing a way out of the woods that may only take us deeper into them. It provides lyrics, no matter that Sondheim admits to enjoying the music more. As any admirer knows, his gift is the unmatched dance of music and lyrics, the nearly stammered wordsmith skill that he calls ordinary ...”

“... bank BCCI, which reported in 1992. The inquiry promised that ‘any individual or department which may be criticised … will be given a full opportunity to challenge the criticisms and rebut adverse findings of fact before any final conclusion is reached.’ The Matrix Churchill inquiry into arms sales to Iraq, which began later the same year, made the same ...”

“... years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped that ‘for the last 15 years this change of the whole of being has been prepared, a change in which the movement must ...”

“... or did it develop by stages from an original formless mass (epigenesis)? These questions may have been reformulated over the centuries, but they are still at the heart of the life sciences. The unfortunate error of timing, which made the questions harder to answer, was that biology developed as a science later than physics. Physics – above all ...”

“... with keeping the water hot. Elder John has come, in the nick of time, to save their souls. But he may be too late.Over several days, as they travel by coach, rail and finally steamboat to New Bethany, Elder John teaches them the history and tenets of Shakerism, and wins everyone over – except for Harley, who, mindful that his dying father designated him ...”

“... joke continues to run because James is worried about the worldly obscurity his stylistic obscurity may end in, and the comic heightening of their contrasted fortunes flatters even as it caricatures her. They share the joke, but it in no way settles their differences. In 1913, worried at James’s anxieties about money, she tried to get up a $5000 birthday gift ...”

“... we were more like Sweden, only 20 per cent more like the United States. Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher may not call an election until late 1987 or early 1988, and even then, whereas the Conservatives only have to have 35 per cent of the total vote to be sure of being called by the Queen, and Labour 36, the Alliance has to have 41. The two old parties, even ...”

“... does not automatically, as many have expected, wipe out old feuds and prejudices: new mass media may harden them instead. He details the growth of the road network, enabling the farmer to bring his produce to the market and to move about and meet others, and the spread of literacy and publishing: all this has been amplifying public excitements, ‘changing ...”

“... major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis wandered from Trotskyism into the ‘bourgeois deviationism’ of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The heteroclite ruminations ...”

“... to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist ...”

“... coal mines. But we’ll brandish our sensitivities proudly (if not our safety pins, which may be too smug and lame a gesture), since they’re what we’ve got, and are anyway better than robotic numbness, better than ‘normalisation’. Yet figuring exactly which pretzel-shape to twist our sensitivities into – I’ll pity those who revile me, for ...”

“... In a spirited attempt to forestall criticism, Margaret Doody warns her readers that they may ‘feel horrified at what they they regard as a changeling-substitution of a mad Gothic feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in Evelina and the Journals, Professor Doody sets out to present an altogether different version ...”