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“... Has anyone ever written a satirical account of the first meeting between Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre? In an age when victims long to be mocked, in a country where satire is an essential part of the cultural heritage, and with two principals who have together inspired much controversy and aroused much dislike, the apparent absence of ridicule must be significant ...”

“... psychoanalysts say, we introjected him. There’s a limit, I suppose, to how much introjection a man can take, and in 1974 John Bayley reached it, giving up as a tutor to devote himself to writing. Since then he has published several books and a stream of essays in the academic and periodical press, a stream which is only now at its remarkable flood. The ...”

“... of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold waking of men ...”

“... when any sort of ‘presence’ is affirmed. His first major deconstruction was of no less a man than Husserl, whose account of the meaningfulness of signs in his essay ‘The Origin of Geometry’ gets short shrift from Derrida. Similarly, Lévi-Strauss, whom one might have taken as a man acutely aware of the ...”

“... like ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ is challenged by the titles of the two recent books by Derrida, De l’esprit and Psyché, both published in France in 1987. Of Spirit reflects on whether this vocabulary can really be avoided, and it does so principally by asking whether Heidegger, whose intention in Being and Time was to avoid the notion of spirit, was ...”

“... constellation of original critics, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and the late Paul deMan, were already doing before Derrida came along to join them). Derrida did write some things which encouraged the belief that he had discovered a brand-new whiz-bang method of finding out what texts ‘were ...”

“... bored.’ General Alfredo Quijano’s first words were ‘Still a little closer.’ Maximilien de Robespierre’s first words were ‘Thank you, sir.’ Gertrude Stein’s first words were ‘In that case, what’s the question?’ Henry David Thoreau’s first words were ‘Moose ... Indian ...’ Sir Thomas Urquhart’s first word was something like ...”

“... problems and antinomies that dominate classical reason. Rather, it has attempted to exclude them de jure from its own more ‘radical’ or liberated discourse, only to reveal how far it is in thrall to those same (unrecognised) critical motifs. In short, these thinkers have opted for a rhetoric of militant unreason, thereby depriving thought of any power to ...”

“... of his life, he undertook his autobiography, a small book published in French as Chroniques de ma vie, whose precise authorship, like that of Stravinsky’s other prose works, has been disputed. Stravinsky’s St Petersburg friend Walter Nouvel seems to have done much of the writing, but Walsh shrewdly observes that the book must have engaged a ...”

“... take the pains to learn the métier and is lucky enough to find a composer he can believe in’. Paul Muldoon, who ranks with Auden as a poet for whom the intricacies of verse and rhyme are endless and masterable, and who lives in America, as Auden did, has written a libretto for a composer of whom I confess I haven’heard. He is Daron Aric Hagen, and ...”

“... they said, as diamond sorters, at the sumptuous London headquarters of the diamond mining company De Beers, just across the road, but had recently been sacked – for allegedly stealing diamonds. Allegedly? How had this crime been proved? Well, they explained, no diamonds had been found on them or in their homes, for the very good reason that they hadn’t ...”

“... of wisdom from a handsaw of knowingness. A second assumption is that modern society and modern man are not just different from the past, but absolutely unique: in nature, historical situation, problems, attitudes, anguish and art, as well as in the need for a new post – ‘humanist’ kind of literary criticism. This, too, is a proposition that might ...”

“... Writing (2006), which recorded his responses to just two paintings by Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c.1648) and Landscape with a Calm (1650-51), when they were hung together at the Getty in Los Angeles for a few months in 2000. Although Clark has always adhered closely to the work of art, here his attention became almost obsessive. In ...”

“... those who had done evil would be punished, and those who had died would be avenged.’ But as a man he came to realise Germany had not been systematically purged and that ‘the architects of the country were the same men who had held high positions in the regime which my boyhood heroes had fought to overthrow.’ Worse discoveries followed. Thousands of ...”

“... In the view of Jakob Burckhardt and his followers, Sigismondo was the patron par excellence, a man who had given commissions not only to Alberti and Duccio, but to Piero della Francesca and the greatest of all the Renaissance medallists, Pisanello. Pound had seen the building for the first time some ten months earlier, in May 1922, while touring Central ...”