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“... I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork silhouette which looms over Ground Zero, seem to sneer at us, laughing at our fragile optimism. The notion of the ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection ...”

“... but outside comedy, he was allured by the portentous and the pretentious, since they offered some hope of concealing from him the implications of his seeing cultivated people as shrimps while not being interested in any other kind of person. The bored dislike and distaste in the Journal suggest Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, which have been said by Rupert ...”

“... of smart Turns of Wit and Humour, as I have produced, which have a proverbial Air: However, I hope, it will be considered, that even these were not originally Proverbs, but the genuine Production of superior Wits, to embellish and support Conversation; from whence, with great Impropriety, as well as Plagiarism (if you will forgive a hard Word) they have ...”

“... because the making of the play Othello shows the triumph of plotting over story-telling’. What hope, then, for art if its every resource can be turned into a species of demonic self-parody, a virtual technique for destruction? His response to this question is the heart of Josipovici’s argument, though it might appear, from the formalist standpoint, not ...”

“... I do now? I don’t know. Hang myself?    I’ve thought about that for years, I may do that. Hope that the state executes me? That’s more acceptable and easier than suicide. But they haven’t executed anybody here since 1963 (just about the last year for legal executions anywhere). What do I do, rot in prison? Growing old and bitter and eventually ...”

“... the machine being switched off. Mollie, distraught beyond description, left the decision to me. I hope never to be confronted with another like it. There was a degree of mystery as to the cause of his accident. The most likely explanation was loss of control while tanked. But there had also been a recent history of occasional blackouts, for which the only ...”

“... outside Rome in April 1849, described him as ‘the hero most worthy of poetry of any I can ever hope to meet in my entire life’. ‘Our souls,’ he wrote, ‘have been conjoined, as if we had been sisters in heaven before finding ourselves living on earth.’ Bassi remained chaplain to the legionaries and spiritual adviser to the fiercely anticlerical ...”

“... is a reliable guide here, and Philippe-Alain Michaud has covered as many bases as a curator can hope to do. His show at Beaubourg is planned in the manner of a defensive shield: incoming criticisms probing for gaps will simply bounce off, detonating in the ether once they encounter his dome of contingencies and associations, fashioned from a wealth of ...”

“... leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night ... And if I went on listening to that far whisper, silent long since and which I still hear, I would learn still more, about this.By the end of The Unnamable, however, the voices and the figures who listen to them have been dismantled along with ...”

“... what all fashionable portrait painters strive for: the ability to make people look as good as they hope they look and maybe do – with a little skill in arrangement and lighting. Not that he always succeeded: the Countess of Sussex complained that he had made her ‘quite out of love with myself, the face so big and so fat that it pleases me not at ...”

“... modern English history. Whether or not we call them ‘crises’, moments of heightened fear or hope invariably found poets in the front line of political agitation. In 1562-63, and again in 1579-81, there were the uncertainties over the succession and over Queen Elizabeth’s readiness, in addressing them, to put the nation’s interests before her own. In ...”

“... is Ian Paisley, and to know or guess the parts played in the history of the North by ‘Munro, Hope, Porter and McCracken’. Maybe they know that ‘sheugh’ means ditch: a paragraph in John Braidwood’s The Ulster Dialect Lexicon mentions it as ‘that Ulster favourite sheugh’, and reports that it is ‘recorded all over Scotland from Aberdeen to ...”

“... presiding over a war-torn nation where the customary bonds of local co-operation had broken. As Christopher Durston remarks, their reforming achievement was restricted to the closing of a few hundred alehouses, the rounding up of a few hundred vagabonds, the ejection of a few ungodly ministers from their livings. The nation’s moral and sexual habits, as ...”

“... Who better to be our guide to modern Cambridge than the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History? Christopher Brooke was brought up in Cambridge, the son of the professor of medieval history and himself a post-war Apostle. He begins by whisking us round the colleges telling us what each was like in Victorian times and how the abolition of the religious Tests and the Royal Commission (1872) transformed Cambridge from being a provincial seminary and a federation of colleges into a university of faculties and departments where the dons could marry and no longer had to be clergymen ...”

“... for philosophy is the aim, happily, of both Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror and Christopher Norris’s Modern Master volume. Gasché’s is a formidable book, a dense, none too easy, but splendidly full and orderly synthesis of Derrida’s thought, which makes a meticulous case for him as a philosopher of real substance, given the radical ...”