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“... the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson ...”

“... The first, taken from the Quarterly Review, advises: ‘If you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!’ She did so with remarkable alacrity: in the 18 months after Charlotte’s death in 1855 she read hundreds of letters and interviewed scores of friends and acquaintances, from whom all sorts of ...”

“... wholly adequate to every detail in the universe as seen from every possible angle, no one could read it. A text that was adequate to every detail as seen from every possible angle would be unsituated; it would not proceed from a perspective – a ‘here not there’ – but from everywhere and therefore from nowhere. Human beings, however, cannot be in ...”

“... to sound more and more racist.’ As both Benedict and Matoesian proceed, their books begin to read like an attack on clichés as such. Get the clichés and you get the crime. If we consider which clichés are in question (‘virgin’, ‘vamp’, ‘racial monster’), their concern seems understandable. But when Benedict wants to know why the press went ...”

“... loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to the social ...”

“... nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read here as metafictions of a sort, metaphors of Hemingway’s aesthetic. And there is no reason to doubt Reynolds’s claims about Hemingway’s influence. His stories of the Thirties – featuring a lesbian wife, a homosexual bullfighter, a castrated boy ...”

“... this outcome was less gratifying. It infuriated anti-revisionist stalwarts like Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, who consider that in 1991 their side won the Sovietological argument along with the Cold War, and that this victory should be duly acknowledged. Malia’s complaint that he has been marginalised in an academic field whose members refuse to address ...”

“... a sense of something ‘charged with meaning’. Gray and Whittall believe the phrase should be read as ‘purely friendly relationship to the young lady’. This is much too unambiguous. Wagner’s phrase need not be taken to mean that his relationship was chaste. Doubtless he was teasing Cosima as he dictated. R.J. Hollingdale’s translation of ...”

“... that fits him to his biography. Wilde was to become a ‘common prisoner’, wear convict dress, read Dante in Reading Gaol and write a great and scarifying ballad about a murderer’s execution. However, what fascinated him in 1882 was the image of that tidy, white, utilitarian building with books of poems inside it. What relation could Dante and Shelley ...”

“... brutal the treatment of children. Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family (1975), now read in many European countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some horrifying passages about maternal indifference and neglect. When ...”

“... stream’ of Victorian periodical writing. More than most directories, the BLM series can be read as literary history. Each volume shows lines of development, innovation, experiment and decay. It was (probably for the surviving remnant still is) an article of Leavisite faith that the health of a culture is gauged by its literary magazines. They reflect ...”

“... between one possibility and another, the relation must be logical or internal. In fact, as Richard Rorty remarks in his contribution to Hoy’s collection, Hacking settles for archaeology in the sense of historical analysis, even though he insists on calling it ‘epistemology’ – that is to say, Erkenntnistheorie. For his part, Rorty welcomes the ...”

“... studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. One of the twins in Neubauer’s study later remarked, ‘This is nightmarish, Nazi shit,’ while the psychiatrist involved in the study confessed: ‘In those days we were playing God.’ Satan, I’d ...”

“... opened it with a rusty key fastened to a turtledove, he found a piece of parchment that read: ‘This day, 6 June 1786, this iron box, containing six handkerchiefs, was placed among the roots of an orange tree by me, Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro, to serve in the performance of an act of magic, which will be executed on the same day sixty years hence ...”

“... it begins where the troubadour canon leaves off. Along with a handful of lyrics by Chaucer, Richard Rolle, and some less familiar names, it includes fifty anonymous poems of immense variety. Genres are defined loosely, if at all, and even such basic categories as ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ prove to be thoroughly intertwined. In place of the ...”