“... the Rosetta Stone for the British Museum. ‘The East offers an ambitious man a vast field,’ Henry Layard, then aged 25, remarked in 1842 after nearly three years knocking about with the tribes of south-west Persia. Layard caught the fancy of Stratford Canning, who had just started his first stint as ambassador to the Sublime Porte and sent Layard to ...”

“... that the constitution of the country should declare ignorance to be entitled to as much political power as knowledge.’ No such strategy was possible for Labour. Indeed, Labour’s class loyalties rendered the intellectual somewhat suspect, so that he often felt the need to justify himself by elaborately distancing himself from the interests of his ...”

“... and to die. He remarks that ‘it would be fatuous to think that poetry is by definition without power of incitement.’ On the next page he retracts, or balances, the suggestion: ‘Above every poem or novel there should be a motto: “This road does not go through to action.” ’ It may be that all the claims about action and imagination which he makes ...”

“... and that you are my creature, my creature, my creature, in which all my spirit lives with the very power of my creation, so much so that it has become your thing and you are all my life.’ ‘My Marta’, he begins every letter. His appeals for her affection are monotonously desperate; but he has never understood her at all, she evidently says in one of her ...”

“... ancient or modern, dated or novel? In A Maggot he has not followed the conventions deriving from Henry Fielding – and indeed 1736 is four years too early for a Fielding novel. The actor, Lacy, timorously admits, in the course of A Maggot, that he has been performing in Fielding’s dissident play, Pasquin, and we may know (though Fowles does not mention ...”

“... but that is a trite comment which leads nowhere. Man is endowed with curiosity and the power to theorise (attributes which geneticists can explain his possessing without difficulty); scientific man has exploited this endowment with astonishing success, and sociological man wishes to emulate him. Scientific man has developed concepts of ever greater ...”

“... militantly committed to publicising the emblems of primitive religion. The rich but unintellectual Henry Blundell of Ince Blundell in Lancashire had a statue which had attracted d’Hancarville’s admiring notice, of a reclining hermaphrodite with infants at the breasts. Blundell heretically declared it unnatural and took a short way to putting matters ...”

“... a passage from Three Guineas. The answer is obvious, but typically begs the real question: the power and lucidity of Woolf’s writing are only evidence that she was not ‘mad’ if we assume that the truly mad would be for ever incapable of recovering their sanity. To find Trombley’s logic muddled is not to endorse the moral and intellectual confusions ...”

“... the treatise that was most instrumental in conveying ancient thought on the character-revealing power of the face and bodily bearing, was attributed in the Middle Ages to Aristotle himself. Such ambivalence persisted into the 18th century. Diderot often respectfully alluded to physiognomy in his philosophical writings and applied it in his fictional ...”

“... late 19th century, she suggests, was an especially trying time for landowners, as their political power, landed wealth and social status were undermined by the agricultural depression, the reform of local government, the extension of the franchise, the imposition of death duties, the introduction of industrialists into the peerage, the Liberal attack on the ...”

“... resembles Partridge’s in his various dictionaries of English slang. Given the concordance-making power of the computer, comprehensive surveys of fiction language usage are now feasible. (A prospect which probably gladdens the linguist’s more than the literary critic’s heart.) On occasion, Phillipps shapes up like Raymond Williams, in Keywords, and one ...”

“... wild entrepreneur John Self and the sober writer Martin Amis in Martin Amis’s Money. The real power of the thing is lost by sophisticated literary exploitation. A recent novel by C.J. Koch, The Doubleman, scores by showing a more simplistic and old-fashioned attitude. But arguably, even some classics of the genre, like Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified ...”

“... may have been the exceptions, but like most good novelists they are preoccupied as much with power as with class. Furbank mentions some lord who said it was ‘middle-class not to decant champagne’. Attitudes to this pronouncement might be taken as a good instance of the difference between ‘unholy pleasure’ and true snobbery. As in the case of the ...”

“... and it haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... done so, it is not clear that, left to themselves, they have left themselves much to say. It was Henry Sidgwick who best exposed the pretension. And it was Sidgwick who, from well beyond the grave, did as much as anyone to keep the subject out of Cambridge. Yet he was not an obvious enemy. In the 1860s he had lectured on philosophy and political theory in ...”