“... more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues ...”

“... through an indefinite number of generations by what is really a form of artificial selection. This may sound an unpromising basis for exploring Darwinian evolution. However, partly because they mimic both the genetic and the developmental characteristics of organisms, biomorphs turn out to be spectacularly successful evolutionary material. Quite rapidly, the ...”

“... novels have been preoccupied with women who feel themselves to be profoundly separate. This may be the result of either choice or necessity, or of stoically making a choice of necessity. They are often tempted to alleviate this solitariness by falling in love with a man or attaching themselves to a couple or a family, but this usually ends in recoil and ...”

“... Croisset, 15-16 May 1852. Saturday-Sunday, 1 a.m.The small hours of Sunday morning find me in the middle of a page that has taken me all day and is still far from finished. I am putting it aside to write to you, and in fact it may perhaps take me into tomorrow evening, since I often spend several hours looking for a word, and since I have several to find, it is quite likely that you would still be waiting all next week if I were to wait until I had finished ...”

“... the damage done to the body by toxic chemicals. If she is right, something of a global holocaust may await us. Not only have entire animal populations been wiped out by becoming unable to reproduce: a whole series of disturbing biological defects is already observable among humans and these are likely to become more and more damaging in the near-future. Theo ...”

“... Throw-away right at the heart of the Holy Grail theme in Ulysses. Yeats, on the other hand, may have been closer in spirit to a friend of mine who, in a poem about the Grand National which Foinavon won at 100/1, had the bookmakers going home in tears at such a big-priced winner, not realising that horses only run at big prices because no one backed ...”

“... You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing, undeniable, incommunicable experience we’ve all had. And yet for all its ubiquity, pain is a solitary encounter, a lonely way of discovering the certainty that you exist ...”

“... on Canvey, a suburban island. The protagonist, Wesley, is either the leader or the target of what may or may not be a cult, depending on how you read things. He sleeps rough, eats gulls, makes his own shaving foam, and is pursued by between two and a dozen stalkers, whom he calls the Behindlings. They are people whose lives ...”

“... from Ben Jonson to Martin Amis, normally disapprove of such sentences; but aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We ...”

“... prolong our stay on the planet through physical survival and reproduction (and their refinements) may be the main priority, but recording our time here is pretty much what we do with our considerable spare brain capacity. Well, we have to do something with it, and it passes the time that would have passed anyway, but there are those, like Beckett and, it ...”

“... Within a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (crafted in Pakistan or North Korea) may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but also the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever ...”

“... not the final answer, after all. If someone else is found to have taken Madeleine McCann – as may well be the case – it will show that the ordinary life of an ordinary family cannot survive the suspicious scrutiny of millions. In one – completely unverified – account of her interrogation, Kate McCann is said to have responded to the accusation that ...”

“... turn of the screw, there is the narrator’s own mistress, who is close to his father in age and may be willing to keep the older man company in his son’s bed. These scenes are heartbreaking, crude, funny, despairing. In the end it is the father who keeps his dignity and the son who loses his, just as it is the son who vomits up his booze, not the ...”

“... distinguish a message made of logs: ‘Return to the frontier or all is lost, though in time some may reap the benefit and glory of a frozen attitude.’ My mind was made up. We would start for Illinois that very day. Have you considered firecrackers? The deft music contained therein assuages all contenders. Those who arrive last at the party receive the most ...”

“... trilby. Harbourside deer. Memories occupy my mind like bright lights in an urban void: symbols you may not understand when I report them; yet a word in earnest may at times transcend ... Thousands of miles from you, I slip my clothes off. Bed-lamp lit, these sheets look fresh as a new envelope. I’ll turn the hot tap till ...”