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“... and bulging around her as old flesh does. Jeremy Lewison in the catalogue calls it a ‘brutally frank self assessment’, ‘the obverse of a pin-up girl’. But brutal is the wrong word. It is certainly truthful about how things look, selectively truthful in the things it chooses to emphasise or simplify, aggressive perhaps, in the way of people who ...”

“... instances the boy in the shirt in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:51-2), discussed at length by Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy, and the man Joseph meets in a field at Shechem while he is searching for his brothers (Genesis 37:12-18). These characters should not be seen as interpolations, or as survivals of some ...”

“... the gallery has to offer. A stone circle by Richard Long; an early To the Studios painting by Frank Auerbach. It’s difficult to say what these might mean in a Chinese context.This internationalism is new in China, according to the fair’s director, the painter Zhou Tiehai. It seems to indicate an openness to liberal market values, if not to Western ...”

“... of the mid-Seventies, notably the inflationary impact of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. The frank admission of ‘the benefit of two decades’ hindsight’ prefaces the chapter on the Heath Government, coupled with the verdict: ‘His errors – our errors, for we went along with them – did huge harm to the Conservative Party and to the ...”

“... When a Mafia suspect called Joseph Miceli Crimi led police, in March 1981, to an office safe in Castiglion Fibocchi, near Arezzo, which contained the names of prominent Italians and documents linking them to a series of dubious and highly confidential deals, the stability of the entire country came under threat. So, too, did the international institution of Freemasonry ...”

“... people having fun without you.’When she graduated from Hollywood High in 1961, Babitz wrote to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.’ That year her family travelled to Europe so that her father, Sol, a contract violinist for ...”

“... A sort of mystic illumination possessed me ...’ Yet another epiphany occurred when Russell and Joseph Conrad looked ‘deep down into each other’s eyes’. At other times whole books presented their arguments to him in the twinkling of an eye (and it must be admitted that when he got an idea he often developed it with prodigious speed). To view one’s ...”

“... Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world. Some years ago, in an article on Frank O’Hara, he talked about New York no longer being the thrilling place it had been in the days when O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday. This kind of nostalgia can be tiresome: better for each generation to invent a new idea of the new – to enlarge the temple ...”

“... the end of the first paragraph of Heart of Darkness, the full oddity of which was pointed out by Frank Kermode. ‘Gleams of vanished spirits’ – no doubt the souls of all the sailormen haunting the Thames since the savage early days of Roman conquest – seemed acceptable Conradian language, in keeping with the tale’s general atmosphere, except that ...”

“... in Marxstadt, but here was escapism Western style, ‘wholesome’ and ‘hot’ at the same time (Joseph McAleer’s rating). It was wholesome in the sense that these paperbacks with their innocuous strong-man-and-starlet covers contained no swearing or four-letter words or blasphemies or gratuitous squalor, but hot in the sense that a high proportion of them ...”

“... of it. Two of the contributors, however, are members of the Labour Party. According to the editor, Frank Palmer, the idea for the book came from Roger Scruton, who, like several other contributors, also writes for the Salisbury Review and the Times. In short, this book is a product of the New Right. It would have been unthinkable ten years ago for a book to ...”

“... argument becomes too obvious for comfort. The formation and function of canons was the subject of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library lectures, now published as Forms of Attention. The third and concluding lecture is called ‘Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion’. Kermode’s elegant traditionalism allows him to acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing ...”

“... adventures and the fact that three of his wives succumbed to ailments that suggested poison. Joseph Boehm, who designed the commemorative coins for the 1887 Jubilee, may – but then again may not – have died in flagrante with Queen Victoria’s ‘bohemian’ daughter Princess Louise. Politicians used smart dress to cover poor morals: ...”

“... or the self-cancelling title which depends on a willingness to be arch; or titled titles, like Joseph Kosuth’s, where the art work is a text of some description, often a dictionary definition; or the literary satires of Situationism, handled here with deadpan solemnity. Welchman insists that his titles speak up seriously in their own right and that they ...”

“... Milton said he was concerned with ‘things unattempted yet’ – a claim echoed by Fielding in Joseph Andrews. He misses an important point here. As Curtius long ago demonstrated, ‘things unattempted’ is a topos – it is found in Classical Greek. Ariosto was not innocent of blague: he was claiming originality by means of a trite formula. By ...”