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“... who love you.’ To which Jim pulls the sheet over his face. ‘He was beyond language,’ writes Gillian Rose. ‘But not beyond the discomforts of love.’ Gillian Rose turns her back, again and again, on the invitations to ease and gladness which the well-meaning offer in various forms, consolations, placebos ...”

“... of possible freedom. Hence their interest now in Jürgen Habermas, that ‘unifying force’, as Gillian Rose grandiloquently describes him, ‘in the international world of sociological reason’. He produces a reasoned reflection on our collective biography in which he claims to reveal our rational will. There is, accordingly, more to Habermas than ...”

“... all too rare among opponents of ‘theory’ in whatever threatening shape or guise. According to Rose, it is the fault of post-structuralism, not that it has become too much embroiled in theoretical issues, but that it has failed to think through the problems bequeathed by philosophers in the critical tradition descending from Kant. That tradition she sees ...”

“... mistakes’?Of the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite. ‘One must be able to give and take from others, to acknowledge difference and identity, togetherness and separation, understanding and misunderstanding’: so think of ...”

“... of her work by Duke University Press and of this essay, Paul Myerscough interviewed Jacqueline Rose in front of an audience at the London Review Bookshop. An audio recording of the interview can be found here. We live in revolutionary times. I cannot imagine now what it would have been like to be thinking about Rosa Luxemburg if the revolutions in ...”

“... especially the conjectural Gothic Revival west front, came from the Builder, where the rose window he had bodged in, hacking out the Perpendicular original, was described as ‘a stone colander’ and the style of his work as ‘railway-station Gothic’. In 1890 the Oxford English Dictionary added a new verb, ‘to grimthorpe’, meaning to ...”

“... having the word ‘girl’ in the title of a book that guarantees huge sales. First, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, which I – like many readers, I assume – couldn’t put down, but which on reflection I found deeply repellent (more than one or two critics have concurred). Apparently the film is even worse, as in, even more misogynist, making the novel seem ...”

“... after its bombing by the IRA – most insistently by Morris’s SPAB. It, too, was disregarded. Rose Macaulay’s visceral reaction to the bombing of London – and with it the loss of her house and her lover – was the raw expression of the wreckage of her life. For her the Blitz was an ‘an irremediable barbarism coming out of the earth, and of filth ...”

“... service through many conflicts with neighbours across the North Sea, scattered Martello towers rose to deal with the Napoleonic threat, while among the various versions of 20th-century defences, the ubiquitous concrete pillbox crept inland, sometimes to the most unlikely parts of the countryside, places the enemy would have been hard-pressed even to ...”

“... first springing up a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies, and the next year, purple in the rose garden? Glück’s assumption of the God-voice in various modes – ‘Whatever you hoped,’ the God of ‘Retreating Wind’ says, ‘you will not find yourselves in the garden,/among the growing plants’ – allows her to argue not just with the garden ...”

“... concerned with pity but with style and accuracy. The maximum of energy comes not from setting a rose or a pocket-calculator beside the formal notation of a verse structure – all are bathed in human ideas of sophistication, elegance and civilised values. Far more power comes from setting the formal notation of a verse structure beside (even the photograph ...”

“... But much younger and more secularised Jewish writers than Singer seemed too submerged in what Gillian Rose in her scathing essay on Schindler’s List called ‘Holocaust Piety’. In a review in the LRB (23 June 2005) of The History of Love, a novel by Nicole Krauss set in Israel, Europe and the US, James Wood pointed out that its author, born in ...”

“... ambivalence on the woman question is discussed, among other things, in two recent books, by Gillian Beer and Alexander Welsh. Gillian Beer, with a nice sense of the difficulty of taking up a single-minded position on the question of whether George Eliot was more liberated or more constrained about women’s lives in ...”

“... plague, was the norm. Certainly that was true for my mother, whose first two daughters, my sister Gillian and myself, were born in 1947, the year The Plague was published, and 1949; her third daughter, Alison, was born in 1956. The copy I have been reading, underlined and covered with my markings, is the one I studied for French A level, when I was 17.Much ...”

“... by the balls, and threatens to serve them up to him in a sandwich. As the actress who plays Kathy, Gillian Taylforth, has pointed out, more than ten of the fifteen pages of the dialogue in the scene were hers. Having announced he is terminally ill, then repeating the original offence by insisting that the sex was consensual and, as a final insult, asking her ...”