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“... Guggenheim on Central Park, another masterpiece of late modernist building-as-sculpture created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, was suspended. But now the Metropolitan Museum has taken over the old Whitney for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and, at least for the time being, the building, renamed the Breuer, looks much as its architect conceived ...”

“... To live in the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other sources ...”

“... as Heidegger and Bultmann. My fore-understanding cannot be quite the same as that of St Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza or indeed of anybody whatsoever: which leads to relativism, and the opinion that because all fore-understandings are different there can be no one universally acceptable reading of a text. There are, broadly speaking, two schools in ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... of The Secret Scripture, come to distil something of the long tragedy of Ireland itself. When Thomas Dunne, a former loyal servant of the Crown, loses his wits somewhere in the transition from the old Ireland to the new, we have a luminous instance of the interweaving of the personal and the social, one of the great virtues of this literary form. It is no ...”

“... to confute. An Arianist manuscript, drawn verbatim from this book, was among the papers seized at Thomas Kyd’s lodgings on 11 May 1593. These ‘vile hereticall conceipts’, as the investigators called them, were found to be Marlowe’s. They had got ‘shuffled’ with Kyd’s papers when the two writers were sharing a chamber in 1591. A week later ...”

“... the theatre. Similarly dramatic transformations are to be repeated in other parts of the city. Frank Gehry has designed an enormous complex of shops, a basketball stadium and apartments to be built over marshalling yards in Brooklyn. Many residents are against the Gehry construction, though it is not the development itself that is likely to kill the ...”

“... to America’s founding: Southern colonies refused to ratify the Declaration of Independence until Thomas Jefferson struck out a clause attacking the slave trade; the constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in the Federal census, granting slave owners disproportionate representation in Congress; the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri and ...”

“... of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that ...”

“... a need for hope in Americans and in others, and much of that hope died with him. There is, as D.M. Thomas’s novel suggests, continuing disbelief – it can’t have happened, it is a bad dream or a mere movie, reality will pick up and go on again. There is the mythological investment in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in ...”

“... and protected; his greatest ‘labour’ is the burden of carrying his own fool’s bauble. In Thomas Nashe’s comedy Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), the fool, Will Summers, trips lightly onstage, half-dressed and unburdened by any of the things regular courtiers have to worry about: ‘without money, without garters, without girdle, without a ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers ...”

“... shops, windows were open on Via Garibaldi. On the first floor, a woman was leaning out and playing Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’ on her phone. Above her, on the second floor, another woman was leaning out and listening. They sang along to the bits they knew.The total number of cases in the UK reached 2606, and the death toll was 104. The British ...”

“... she understood extremes.’ He makes a meal of one particular sentence (the subject is Dylan Thomas): ‘He died, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.’ Sonically, musically, it is a straightforwardly beautiful sentence: the rhyme and more between ‘died’ and ‘bedside’, the ‘i’s in ‘Valentino’ and ...”

“... is famous. But Searle is not offering us a new argument: rather, an old one, recently revived by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson. There is also a standard, devastating reply to it which has been in the undergraduate textbooks for a decade. On the most obvious and reasonable interpretation, to say that John’s mental states ...”