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“... very likely to change. But there are two others whose claims for inclusion are regularly pressed: Nicholas Malebranche (b. 1638), to be inserted between Leibniz and Locke; and Thomas Reid (1710-96), best inserted between Hume and Kant rather than between Berkeley and Hume, on the grounds that his major works are a response ...”

“... alcun concetto C’ un marmo sole in se non circonscriva Col suo superchio ... (‘Not even the best of artists has any conception / That a single marble block does not contain / Within its excess ...’) There is also a madrigal (No 153) written for Vittoria Colonna which is not about the carving of marble but about the casting of metal: It’s not only ...”

“... is a terrific reader who can open up Dickens like a plate of gleaming oysters, setting out the best passages about handwriting from Nicholas Nickleby to Great Expectations. He notes the erotic seethings that illegible handwriting occasions in Proust, and his disdain for a decipherable hand in the novel and the ...”

“... 1970s, Lord Snowdon used the space to make motors for Chairmobiles wheelchairs. In the late 1980s, Nicholas Serota, then the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, heard that the site was up for sale and advised him to buy it. The studio was finished in 1991 at a cost of nearly £300,000.These transformations from livestock to light industry to artist’s studio ...”

“... pages before it faded. The exorbitance of his style suited comedy better than pathos. At his best – where his work springs up out of the confluence of grammar and gaiety, of logic and facetiousness, of structure and silliness – he can be one of the funniest writers in the language. When he’s on a roll, his riffs approach the written equivalent of ...”

“... the Ulster Rebellion of 1641 clarify English crises at the expense of their local significance. As Nicholas Canny implies in the collection about Thomas Wentworth, Anglocentrism is particularly insidious when talk of interaction across the archipelago is used to obscure English expansionism. These books show how different the results can be when Early Modern ...”

“... was unheard of. His first recording with Columbia – Bach’s Goldberg Variations – was the best-selling classical record of 1956 and remained in the catalogue for over twenty-five years. This record established Gould as an international star, and in the public mind it forged a link between Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations which remains strong ...”

“... and fast. Part of the trouble with these scenes may be that Mulisch just doesn’t write the very best dialogue, but I think the real problem is inherent in the novel’s structure and the very powerful message which that structure is designed to put across. The interests of fiction have deferred here to the purposes of poetry. The episodes which fill up the ...”

“... but Caravaggio’s paintings deserve to be protected from them. Take his Fortune Teller (the best version, of about 1598, is in the Louvre), in which a smiling gypsy girl looks into the face of a young fop as she fingers his palm, detaining his eye and stopping his heart, or at least exciting his vanity, so that he doesn’t notice she is also removing ...”

“... Hamlet appeared in three. For readers since the 18th century, the narrative poems have been at best marginal to the Shakespeare canon. The sonnets, on the other hand, which were the least known of his non-dramatic poems until the end of the 18th century, had by the 20th century become essential to the construction of the canonical Shakespeare. This ...”

“... a book that makes you want to weep. Red Storm Rising has been on or near the top of the American best-seller lists for well over a year now. Before its run is over, the book will have sold the better part of three million copies in cloth and paperback. It is, in fact, the second huge success for Tom Clancy Jr, a 46-year-old former insurance broker from the ...”

“... had seen ‘dramaturgy’ at work in German theatres and knew something of what Edmund Tracey and Nicholas John had been doing at the English National Opera. No one did that kind of thing at Covent Garden, and the mail I received suggested that others, too, thought it was high time they started. Those in the House were less certain. An opera house is a trade ...”

“... to extend their possibilities, and they were willing to uproot themselves in order to do so. Nicholas Lemann’s judicious, well-written study concentrates on the poor blacks of Clarksdale, Mississippi, who moved to Chicago. The invention and production of cotton-picking machines had begun to undercut the value of their work, while Chicago, deprived of ...”

“... will never die (‘I had thought – secretly I was certain – that life goes on and on’). His best argument for immortality has always been sex. To live has been to fuck and to fuck has been to live. As the chances fade for dynamic sexual relations with a woman so does his sense of being alive. Without a woman, Roth’s Everyman is discovered to have no ...”

“... meaning is life itself: ‘Such a good thing, life! Such a wonderful idea for God to have had! The best idea there had ever been,’ as Mrs Curren puts it in Age of Iron (1990). And then there is the soul – a word that, together with ‘heart’, is central to Coetzee’s vocabulary. The complacent and self-serving deviousness of human personality is ...”