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“... at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village during the academic session 1946-47. Arthur Kirsch has pieced them together from the records of four people who attended them. To have one’s lectures put together from students’ notes years after they were given is a rare mark of distinction; offhand I can only think of Saussure and ...”

“... over danger, or stood deadpanning the camera while death squeezed past him. Charlie Chaplin, a little man too big for the real world, smiled at every manner of threat, ducked it, ran from it, cheating death with a welter of small human surprises and tendernesses, and always, in the end, walking away bandy-legged from the worst the world has to offer, the ...”

“... of the wild and innocent child she used to be. ‘In the end, there is only this: she is the little girl in the moose’s antlers.’ Alice Thomas Ellis would sympathise with many of these bleak insights. Her weekly sketches of domestic disorganisation used to appear in the Spectator and are now published in the Tablet. A new collection of these ...”

“... essentially to an extended exercise in the contextualisation of Democracy in America, and has very little to say about the rest of Tocqueville’s life and work. Jaume, who probably knows Tocqueville’s intellectual world better than anyone else alive, has reconstructed his reading in intricate detail, and brilliantly demonstrates the way particular themes ...”

“... well-intentioned but unconvincing effort at rehabilitation, His Royal Highness Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, and Earl of Sussex, was the prototypical marginal royal. If the essential qualification for worldly fame and posthumous glory is the possession of a large number of close relatives with crowns, he ...”

“... of the construction of his ballets. Meisner explains what Petipa took from Jules Perrot and Arthur Saint-Léon, his collaborators at the Imperial Ballet; how French and Italian techniques intermingled in the Russian context; how grand ballets differ from ballets-féeries; and how Petipa responded to demands for more or less patriotic content. She ...”

“... that the destructive effects work in both directions). Also on board the Volunteer, under Captain Arthur Brownlee’s command, is Patrick Sumner, the ship’s surgeon, recently returned from India – he was at the Siege of Delhi – and now discharged, not altogether honourably, from the army. He is looking forward to an ‘easeful’ time on the Volunteer ...”

“... trickier task of reconstructing the conjugal partner in that enterprise, whose life often seems little more than an endless round of state dinners and high-class shopping. In the end, Perry does as well as any biographer can with a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest ...”

“... so as to get a better aim on another. Empathy is routinely booby-trapped, while satire can yield little surges of feeling. He can and does create character, but every now and then there is a hint of the writer in the background, holding his breath while he calibrates his effects, making minute adjustments to the telescopic sight. Here Paul Raison, the ...”

“... political history, fiction (the ‘lost worlds’ of Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Bur roughs and Arthur Conan Doyle), film, advertising, depth psychology and art (paintings in art museums and museums of science, cartoons and comics). The scholarship is successfully air-brushed by an elegant Post-Modern presentation. Mitchell, who teaches English and art at ...”

“... most famous American poem of the Victorian age is ‘Away in a manger’ (anonymous), with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And ...”

“... The test of poetry which professes to be modern’, Arthur Symons wrote in 1892, is ‘its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there.’ And what the poets see is a transformation of the human face. In the country, ‘The face of every neighbour whom I met/Was as a volume to me,’ Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, but neighbours were harder to read in London: ‘The comers and goers face to face,/Face after face ...”

“... Sam Phillips jumped into a ‘big old Dodge’ with his older brother and a few friends a little after midnight and set out to drive from Florence, Alabama to Dallas, Texas to hear a celebrated First Baptist pastor deliver a sermon. At four or five a.m. the boys arrived in Memphis, where they found themselves in a black part of town called Beale ...”

“... mystery. Her writing is so flat and cliché-ridden and undistinguished that we pay very little regard to it as we forge through the story; if those phrases of Ackroyd’s are oddly stiff it is just a matter of his creator’s regrettable insufficiency in this important department of literature. Than this, however, nothing could be further from the ...”

“... at least articulate. Lennon had turned away from verbal play into the Primal Scream therapy of Dr Arthur Janov – seen by Lennon’s public at best as a fashionable bolt-hole for the rich hysteric, and at worst as a profiteering alliance between phoney art and phoney medicine: Yoko and some quacks bleeding our John. It was an uncharitable attitude, but the ...”