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“... hard for most Parisians, but Ayer lived in Guy de Rothschild’s house in Paris, supported by a butler, a cook and a good cellar. When this arduous postwar service was over he returned to Oxford, at a time when philosophy in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real ...”

“... contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ‘cancel culture’, though she doesn’t ...”

“... fitful intimation. Art, or theory, is the enemy of the natural and familiar. Felski quotes Judith Butler as denigrating the familiar in contrast to the other or unknown, a standard postmodern move; but one continues to hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the familiar for ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... touted names in contemporary North American literary criticism and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 ...”

“... my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to ...”

“... privation, they did so not out of a supererogatory deference to the existing order, but because Butler and Beveridge and the Attlee administration brought about a quiet but enduring revolution. At the same time, the nationalisation of large sections of the industrial base, and an economic climate that was delivering full employment, had shifted power ...”

“... horsemen defeating Persians at the battle of Al-Qadissiya (AD 637). It is in the style of Lady Butler painting British cavalry engagements in the last century. This painting forms the outer circle: the inner circle is of sand, realistically strewn with ancient armour, the helmets and weapons of the fallen. The greenjackets wanted to remind us that there is ...”

“... obvious choices: it does not include Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, for instance, nor John Bayley’s Tolstoy and the Novel. Though not biographical, they might have been useful: after all, everyone already knows that Sonya and her sister Tanya were the joint models for Natasha in War and Peace. On the other hand, Ms Edwards has read In the ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”

“... but he got one soon after leaving: It’s Me, Eddie (1983) was soon followed in English by His Butler’s Story (1987), and Memoirs of a Russian Punk (1990). Limonov’s Russian bibliography lists more than a dozen subsequent titles (presumably Carrère has read them all). The first half of Limonov rearranges the early memoirs into a linear chronology, and ...”

“... of which is a little hard on the historical Cavendish: a gentleman usher was several cuts above a butler, and Cavendish could make cunning political use of his complaints about the operations of Fortune). In the novel we see the scene of Cromwell weeping in the window from Cromwell’s perspective rather than Cavendish’s. As Mantel tells his story, Cromwell ...”

“... Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Umberto Eco – who were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as ...”

“... subject to political debate. But in English literary culture since the Romantic period, as Marilyn Butler has shown, there has been an opposing tendency, a reaction against Enlightenment values and a tendency to exalt the inner, authentic world of the imagination against a political world considered to be irredeemably fallen and inauthentic. Few critics have ...”