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“... of Albertine de Staël, probably Constant’s daughter) gives an account of one such reading, at Madame Récamier’s, where Constant broke into sobs as he neared the end: everyone present, already very moved, began crying as well; soon the room was full of weeping and moaning; then suddenly, as the result of a psychological mechanism which is ...”

“... except by acclamation, persuasion and the marketplace. This view of things must colour any reading of Roos’s Early Impressionism and the French State. She writes about the Salon and its politics, which are peripheral if one has already decided that no politics or institution had much to do with the large-scale changes which took place in ...”

“... afternoon in front of the computer, debugging a program, or working on an article. If they do any reading at all it’s likely to be a matter of checking a reference in a scientific journal before citing it in a footnote. Perhaps they return a few phone calls or reply to computer mail. Von Neumann’s legacy is at the centre of a number of the pieces of New ...”

“... remember how the moment of perception – and idolatry of the sense datum – dominated painting. Reading art history, one imagines the painters of the world getting into huddles and saying: ‘Well lads, what next?’ Irwin has answered the question – having asked it of himself – several times. One of the most attractive aspects of avant-garde art is ...”

“... explain away the lack of class-consciousness among the proletariat as a whole. Capitalism, on this reading, was able to buy off the potential leaders of the working class, whose subsequent conservatism played an indispensable role in sustaining the status quo. In this form the argument has several weaknesses, which have been cogently summarised in a well-known ...”

“... that busy Treasury officials did not sit around debating what they had learned in their bedtime reading of the General Theory. It was a work, as Keynes said in the preface, ‘chiefly addressed to my fellow economists’. That certainly included Hawtrey, the only professional economist in the Treasury, though correspondingly removed from the hurly-burly of ...”

“... budgets. But it was what American Keynesians often preached, and Schumpeter was not alone in his reading of Keynes’s message. Nor was Schumpeter egregious in seizing on the famous observation about being dead in the long run. It obviously showed him, and demonstrated for the benefit of others, Keynes’s short-term irresponsibility. Yet the point that ...”

“... its rightful congregation that come through art and literature.’ He believes that, like hunting, reading Jane Austen is a binding social ritual. TV adaptations don’t count. ‘The property of an educated élite’, high art was barely held onto by the Modernists, and has been lost entirely in the weltering wastes of Post-Modern kitsch, with its ...”

“... The experience of reading this book is a paradoxical one. Innovative, expertly researched and luminous in style, it nonetheless seems at times almost eerily familiar. The reason for this quickly becomes evident. Those who know their Jane Austen well have been here before. There are echoes of the novels even in some of the characters we encounter in Amanda Vickery’s volume: the clergyman’s wife from a commercial background, for instance, who – very much in the manner of Mrs Elton – addresses her spouse as ‘Mr R ...”

“... democracy looks like. Or does it? There are at least two problems with this somewhat Panglossian reading of the election result. As Peter Mair pointed out, European voters tend to register their opposition to the EU in the wrong forum. The European Parliament doesn’t decide the shape of the Union as a whole; that is ...”

“... to order. The paper was a near disaster within two years of starting up, until it was rescued by Peter Cook – the founder of the Gnome dynasty – on his return from the US tour of Beyond the Fringe. At the end of the 1970s, the Eye stumbled into a period of pointless malice and political irrelevance: Julian Barnes saw how bad things threatened to become ...”

“... little earlier he worked on Jesus of Nazareth for RAI and ITC. After telling us of all his advance reading (including ‘the New Testament in Greek ... to get a fresh look at it’) he tells us: ‘I had to remake Judas from scratch. I remade him first as a decent American college boy ...’ Coarse? Undoubtedly, not just in style but in the vulgarity of his ...”

“... on a computer at a psychiatric day centre when he interrupts his story to type ‘please stop reading over my shoulder’ in large capitals. ‘I had to put that in big letters to drive the message home. It worked, but now I feel bad about it. It was the student social worker who was looking over my shoulder.’ There are three timeframes in the ...”

“... of refuge and fantasy’. It is one of those destinations – ‘like the South of France before Peter Mayle, and Tuscany before champagne socialists’ – which, it is assumed, is ‘unspoilt by the American coffee shops and the malls and the ring roads that have ruined Arnoldian England’. But as Sansom discovers, the Ireland of middle-class English ...”

“... O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt in ‘Memorial Day 1950’, in which O’Hara figures himself reading music by the light of ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Yet a note of uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades Apollinaire’s acts of poetic self-naming, even in lines seemingly brimming with confidence: ‘Je ...”