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“... than a plight. What Goethe learned in Italy, Boyle says, was ‘where his true spiritual home lay – not, after all, in Mignon’s Vicenza but in a land where only those who knew yearning could know what he suffered’. Not in Italy but in Germany, that is, though both places have become allegories of desire, and strange, exclusive ideas crowd into the ...”

“... have had pride of place. For a careful and balanced account of them, there is no finer study than Paul Ginsborg’s Italy and Its Discontents, the work of an English historian in Florence, originally published in Italian, the latest monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar. Long-standing occupation of office has not been peculiar to ...”

“... when it comes to appraising literature, at the expense of whatever ‘social entity’ can lay claim to it. The strong line taken by both Edna Longley and W.J. McCormack – who are sometimes in accord, but more often at loggerheads – testifies to the ebullience of Irish letters, in which things often get very heated indeed. Not invariably, it’s ...”

“... the psychoanalytic societies in Vienna and London. In an effort at reconciliation, Jones and Paul Federn arranged a series of exchange lectures in 1935-36, those from London being given by Jones on ‘Early Female Sexuality’ and Joan Riviere, and those from Vienna by Robert Waelder. In June 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria forced Freud and his ...”

“... from the Ukraine could be as good a sailor as they.’ It was this kind of thorough expertise that lay behind the famous wish ‘to make you see’; and there is even more than that to Conrad’s compelling accuracy of thing and detail. It does the deep work for him, making supererogatory many of his more explicitly intellectual démarches. Or should one ...”

“... the cast iron and other modern construction techniques that were transforming the landscape that lay beyond the Picturesque parks of the country houses. Britain’s internal stability had encouraged industrialisation – as well as the art market – and Schinkel was one of those who understood that this was where visitors might learn the most instructive ...”

“... hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside the Slade lay open. Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled conditionals. If chance or affection had given Carrington a push in another direction, she might have painted, cooked, travelled and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade ...”

“... in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when Charles II decided to get rid of his own obstinate ‘hardliners’; that over the years Bunyan’s congregation managed to carry out ...”

“... in 1504, as it was disciplined and enriched by his autodidactic efforts on the epistles of St Paul, some of which lost endeavour may survive as a residue in the Annotationes. Throughout this time, while he was becoming familiar with the Greek text underlying the received Latin version, his aim was not to edit the Greek, but to revise the familiar ...”

“... he wrote to his wife. So much for that famous peaceableness.) More serious exponents were Paul Claudel, poet and diplomat (Shanghai, he wrote in 1896, was ‘an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill’), and Victor Segalen, poet, novelist and physician, who travelled in China between 1909 and 1917. More ...”

“... by Habermas, Charles Taylor and Walzer – ‘silly’. In his view, Foucault’s real difficulty lay in the fact that the ‘strategic’ analysis of power relations did not allow him to answer a different question: how can one resist force? If you are powerless, you are not capable of resisting: you can only endure. If, however, you are able to resist ...”

“... in the works he examined were often where he could hear it most plainly. The art of criticism lay in knowing what to listen out for, and having heard it, to identify and characterise it. ‘I suppose the thing about Hardy is,’ Bayley would typically begin, as though together we were to try and get to the bottom of a fascinating, but ...”

“... anomalous or unexpected effect, but any intelligent scientist does that. Rutherford’s strength lay in always being on the look-out for such effects and being extremely observant in spotting them. The most spectacular of those unexpected effects was obtained in 1909 by two of Rutherford’s collaborators, Geiger and Marsden, when they watched the scattering ...”

“... was either neglected or rejected by the comic tradition. Fielding claimed to find more wit in St Paul. Petronius, perhaps, was too subversive. His genre-chaos and his moral chaos make the other pícaros look quite proper. The same anarchic qualities eventually endeared him to literary revolutionaries at the end of the 19th century. The decadents loved the ...”

“... to shoulder in the dock here – Lacan, Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Deleuze/Guattari and one or two lesser figures – turn out not to know their mathematical arse from their physical elbow when they choose to steal food from Sokal and Bricmont’s professional larder, and start citing Gödel or Quantum Mechanics or ...”