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“... but none of them should play any part in moral philosophy’s critical thought about principles. Bernard Williams, on the other hand, has queried whether theory has any authority to override our intuitive convictions. Many other philosophers are uncomfortable with both of these positions. The dismissal of intuitions seems to open up the danger of a ...”

“... fluency. It’s this evenness of texture that is the basis for the charge that he writes too well. Martin Amis has described the effects created by Updike’s prose as being like cinematography – ‘rich, ravishing, and suspiciously frictionless’. The most memorable piece of Prac Crit performed on Updike comes from Mailer’s novel Tough guys don’t ...”

“... in the amiably long-suffering Russian peasants he drew on a trip to the Soviet Union with Kingsley Martin, who supplied an incongruously starry-eyed commentary; even in his Hitler, whom he invariably belittled by ridicule rather than direct attack: ‘Fuehrer to be kept in bullet-proof bottle.’ Some of Low’s wartime cartoons are solemn. It is rare for him ...”

“... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is ...”

“... particular, or it is a depiction of Chastity. All in all, it may be best to follow the example of Martin Kemp, whose 1981 study of the artist laconically captioned the painting Portrait of a Lady on a Balcony – though even this will not satisfy those denizens of the Mona Lisa websites and news groups who believe that she is really a man, and perhaps even ...”

“... in New York; but on the question of their authorship there is now wide agreement, although Bernard Berenson, for example, took a very different view from the one now accepted.* At stake is not just the status of the drawings themselves, but also the wider question of exactly what contribution Michelangelo made to Sebastiano’s paintings. The drawings ...”

“... left – began with the banning of Mars Bars.In the 1980s liking football was, at best, uncool. Martin Amis described the average football fan as having ‘the body and complexion of a cheese and onion crisp’. At its worst it was criminal: Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford. It was also quite predictable. During Thatcher’s time in office, Liverpool won the ...”

“... and curating. But there is also the allure of their bleak vision. Joy Division’s guitarist, Bernard Sumner, recalls teenage years blighted by the simpering commerciality of the pop charts: he told me recently, with a wince, that one of the reasons he’d wanted to form a band was hearing the song ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’. Not enough attention has ...”

“... little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is selective, impressionistic and extremely unreliable. It encourages little confidence in the author’s judgment. She descends ...”

“... Poet’.Don Juan is a difficult poem to see past. McGann’s starting point is a belief, shared by Bernard Beatty in his essay collection Reading Byron, that the ‘poetic character’ of large swathes of Byron’s work – the non-comic material, much of it produced before his turn to the ottava rima stanza in 1817 – has been ‘obscured by Don Juan’s ...”

“... letters, it is interesting to compare the impact of Roth’s work with that of his polar opposite, Bernard Malamud. Nobody could accuse Malamud’s tight and perfect fables of anything in the slightest bit crude or vulgar or self-advertising. Roth himself admitted as much in The Ghost Writer, whose meta-hero, the saintly E.L. Lonoff, was read by most readers ...”

“... some unfamiliar literary material. Antonio Fernández-Puertas on ‘Spain and North Africa’ and Bernard O’Kane on ‘Iran and Central Asia’ both show mastery of their subject. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout and many of the images of Chinese and sub Saharan mosques will be unfamiliar even to those working in the field of Islamic ...”

“... they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well known’. Tristan Bernard satirised the alien-seekers in a story in which humanity, on receiving an unintelligible message from Mars, writes huge messages across the Sahara: ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What are you making signs for then?’ ‘We’re not talking to ...”

“... knew them. Athanasius’ Life of the Egyptian hermit Antony and Sulpicius Severus’ biography of Martin of Tours, both from the fourth century, became models of the genre. Several medieval saints, among them Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Becket and Catherine of Siena, have Lives that are both richly textured and ...”

“... he defends scholars singled out for attack in Orientalism (H.A.R. Gibb, Gustave von Grunebaum and Bernard Lewis among others), before moving on to a chapter-length critique of Orientalism itself. So how effectively does Irwin challenge Said? Factual purists will be delighted by his pot-shots. He makes mincemeat of such sweeping assertions as ‘Britain and ...”