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“... Viennese, and second that he was an engineer. The Viennese background, brilliantly documented by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, alerts us to the linguistic and moral preoccupations that Wittgenstein shared with others of his generation before ever coming into the orbit of Frege and Russell. And the physics and engineering provide ...”

“... It was superior. Sontag made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. That cost little enough. She then compelled you to admit that she felt more than you did. Her inner life was richer, even if she didn’t fully disclose it. She responded to art more vividly and completely. Not only her sense, but her sensibility, was grander. This was ...”

“... what do they signify? Gould summarised the enduring appeal of dinosaurs in three little words: ‘big, fierce, extinct’. The first and third concepts may be causally related: it may be that dinosaurs no longer have any expanse in time because they had such a great expanse in space; they may have become extinct because they were ...”

“... it has most reason to fear that past. There are no doubt many cities in this condition – with a little insight and a dose of malice each of us could draw up impressive lists. But everyone’s list would surely include Vienna. All the same, it might be objected, Vienna can hardly be said to be discovering its past. Surely no city in Europe has put its ...”

“... Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey into Mashukulumbwe country. Quatermain early on stakes his claim to heroic status when he says that he has already killed, but always ...”

“... Impressions d’Afrique. Just weeks after he’d written resignedly that he still hoped for a ‘little posthumous fame for my books’, Roussel was found dead on the floor of a Palermo hotel room from an overdose of the barbiturate Soneryl. Jean Cocteau, who got to know him a few years earlier in a rehab clinic at Saint-Cloud (and who remembered Roussel ...”

“... to the man who only serves his own.’ Shouldn’t that be ‘the woman who’? McVity is going a little further than Kraus here. In any event this moral superiority, even in the service of an idea, has no intellectual element for Kraus. ‘I enjoy carrying on a monologue with women,’ he writes, ‘but a dialogue with myself is more stimulating’; ‘The ...”

“... It is John Ashbery who takes the cake – in this case, the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it ...”

“... The spirit is not quite so perfect as the letter. The anger and artfulness sometimes jar a little. Like Childe Roland, Mr Laurence blows his own slug-horn. Referring to himself in the third person, he draws our attention to the fact that ‘the bibliographer has taken the licence to be as idiosyncratically obtrusive as Trollope in his novels.’ And in ...”

“... some unforgiving judgments on someone with whom, temperamentally, they remained at odds. ‘A little, churlish man,’ according to the sizeist Fingleton, but O’Reilly went a good deal further: ‘I am inclined to think that in a lot of ways Bradman did a tremendous lot of damage to Australian cricket. He didn’t ever come clean as a personal member of ...”

“... stand their vern acular Who’d keep my love from me afar. By way of words, I guess I’ve found A little saying that runs rife: Let others mouth their loves around; We’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife. (Snodgrass) The unlikely Monk of Montaudon, who was ostensibly commanded by his king ‘to eat meat, court women, sing and write ...”

“... comparable to Pinkerton’s. Furthermore, they worked chiefly on divorce and libel cases, taking little part in the investigation of crime, and so didn’t figure much in the press. In fiction, however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the ...”

“... a great part of the population of Normandy marks itself off from the Parisian riff-raff by putting little longship stickers on their cars. The longships are called drakkars – for reasons no one seems to know, any more than they know where the wildly impractical horned helmet idea comes from – a word which has only some resemblance to genuine Old Norse ...”

“... Beatles, who were once said to be bigger than Jesus. What explains Jackson’s journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to ...”

“... invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The opportunities at court, however, were limited in ...”