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“... According to MacCarthy, ‘the first step to culture is to learn to enjoy, not to know what is best.’ Indeed, he doubted that anyone could know ‘what is best’. For his book column in the New Statesman, he had signed himself ‘Affable Hawk’, but not because he wished to suggest any hint of beakiness. His ...”

“... anecdote, and treating us every few lines to a wry aperçu or humorous sally or teasing aphorism. Geoffrey Braithwaite in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is the most famous example, but the voice that gives the lecture about Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) is almost identical; as is the narrator who speaks as ...”

“... cyma reversa, or conjures light into stone through fluting and foliage. Interestingly enough, the best literature on this all-important topic – Sir William Chambers’s Architecture, for instance, or Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini – does not feature among Rykwert’s two thousand volumes, and even Ruskin (who, for all his impetuous dismissal of the ...”

“... was bisexual. Her affair with her teacher Ruth Benedict lasted for many years, as did that with Geoffrey Gorer. Without these two ‘intense liaisons’ it is unlikely that the bizarre research project known as the Study of Culture at a Distance and its successors would ever have got off the ground. Howard describes these enterprises with appropriate ...”

“... retail was born, as a ‘separate business and major employer’. Manufacturing was a slave’s best chance of gaining freedom and social enhancement, never mind that most were rented out in gangs or that they were valued in sensitive economic sectors because they could be ‘kept honest through torture’. Best of ...”

“... John Sturrock’s little book is the best single guide to its subject that has yet appeared. Structuralism and Since demands, though, that its title be taken literally. It traces, technically and without concession to idle curiosity, the course of ‘structuralism’ in its modern phase – from the moment when it achieved new importance in the work of Lévi-Strauss in the early Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction ...”

“... I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s recent best-seller, Flaubert’s Parrot, quotes a letter from Flaubert to Feydeau: ‘When you write the biography of a friend you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.’ Sir Moses Finley has been my teacher, colleague and friend for close on twenty years, and while I am not intent on taking revenge on his behalf, I can’t claim to be able to write dispassionately about his work, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Ancient History: Evidence and Models, and of the republication in paperback (with additions) of Democracy Ancient and Modern and The Ancient Economy ...”

“... the Evening Standard Award or something similar at Bafta. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through ...”

“... the United States by the Constitution. This last citation is spurious.Some commentators, including Geoffrey Hartman, say that by the standards of the time this was pretty lukewarm anti-semitism. Jacques Derrida – a Jew and a close friend of de Man’s – finds it inexcusable, but demands that it be dealt with justly. He repeats that the article deeply ...”

“... Josef Smrcek and Frantisek Tomes, or about the specialised diet of the sheep that yielded the best 18th-century catgut? The oddest contribution – though also one of the most interesting – is Michael Spitzer’s analysis of the first movement of Symphony No. 46 in B and other pieces in terms of a theory of melody proposed by Eugene Narmour. The idea is ...”

“... anticipating a biography, he sent his friend and mentor E.R. Dodds a list of what he called ‘the best authorities’ on his life so far, ‘though each only from a certain angle’. He was 33 at the time and half-joking but a year earlier he had begun work on an autobiography, The Strings Are False. He had also recently won fame with Autumn Journal, which ...”

“... isn’t necessarily ephemeral. Not all reviews are written lefthandedly by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more ...”

“... easy examination in Divinity then compulsory at Oxford, he went down without a degree. He enjoyed best, and studied energetically, what others neglected to know – not only forgotten Victorian architecture, but the verse of Philip Bourke Marston or that of Ebepezer Jones (whom Mr Hillier, by an un-Betjemanian slip, confounds with Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn ...”

“... indeed. There are a number of conclusions one can draw from his account and it is probably best simply to enumerate them, not necessarily in chronological order. 1. Her first government (1979-83) was probably the best. Although she was careful to ensure that the treasury was staffed by like-minded people – led by ...”