“... problems of the townscape. Visually unappealing though many of the changes in the countryside may be, at least they avoid the mediocrity of so much that technology has given to the contemporary city. In the countryside, four features are especially vulnerable to technological change and the profit motive. They are field boundaries (especially the ...”

“... a TV series and a novel or a critical biography. One’s admiration for all this prudent industry may sometimes be tempered by a feeling that the product, efficient as it is, lacks aura, lacks the zest we associate with this writer in his more exuberant, less mechanical novels. His last novel-of-the-TV-series, The Kingdom of the Wicked, combines Acts and ...”

“... I suspect that no single person alive will be able to figure out all the references. Be this as it may, the indirect style combines with the taking for granted of psychoanalytic theory to create the impression of a book written for a very small circle of readers. It is difficult to convey the purpose of the book – not only because of its elusiveness but also ...”

“... They made life more exciting for themselves than we do. They made sex far more exciting. Or so it may now seem. We wouldn’t actually want to be Victorians, but we love now to understand them to the point almost of identification. So it appears from all the books about them, and their popularity. The popular class for this fond backward look is the ...”

“... editions by marginal presses, they have escaped all but the slightest measure of attention. This may be the usual story for poets, but Oliver – a former journalist who is now teaching in Paris – is developing an unusual poetic which deserves wider interest. His most abiding themes have an autobiographical dimension. Repeatedly, for example, he returns to ...”

“... is somewhat disparaging about the novelist’s skills as a lepidopterist.) When he died, Nabokov may well have been a millionaire for the second time round. Nabokov’s career up to 1967 was not easily brought into single focus and he suffered, in his own mind at least, from a sense of being under- or only partially valued. Field’s body-and-soul devotion ...”

“... siblings ought to be particularly nice to one another, but there is no evidence that they are. It may be largely a matter of taste and temperament whether one is struck by the similarities or the differences between the mammalian radiations. I remember my friend Dick Lewontin giving a seminar on ‘causal and historical explanations in science’. To ...”

“... the fact that von Däniken is crying about their criticisms all the way to the bank. Even so, one may wonder whether the word ‘dangerous’ is really appropriate! Professor Daniel earlier, and much more justifiably, applies it to the archaeological dimension which Chamberlain and Kossinna gave to the idea of the German master-race. It is curious that ...”

“... of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of ...”

“... This is a political claim which many people will reject from the outset, and those dissenters may use the violence of the last twenty years as evidence that none of the available meta-narratives – nationalism, anti-nationalism, imperialism, unionism, socialism, feminism – are sufficiently hospitable to differences. There is a series of questions to be ...”

“... be an absorbing and solitary game. Not so, one feels, for Christina Rossetti, whose love poems may equally be sphinxes without any real secret, and yet with no hint of fantasy or teasing. They are always grave and unselfconscious, impersonal, calm both with sorrow and with belief. Those heavy-lidded Italian eyes look always a little weary, like the Mona ...”

“... in the scene.’ Of Nimoy’s autobiography, though every bit as triumphalist as Nichols’s, one may say that there is a kind of failure built into it, for twenty years ago Nimoy produced a book called I Am Not Spock: now he knows on which side his bread is buttered. As with Nichols, however, the fictional character seems to have swallowed up the real ...”

“... khakis are uniform. (‘Everything he now wore smelled rainily of the iron.’) Lutz’s narrators may be descendants of Bartleby the Scrivener, though incapable of his transcendent ‘I prefer not to.’The sterile vocabulary of offices is subtly deployed to show how deeply it structures our perceptions: ‘I have probably got her features collated all wrong ...”

“... On 21 May​  Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New York Times tellingly describes the last seven years, in which Israel intensified its domination over the Palestinians with impunity – are over. Dead, too, is Trump’s plan to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents ...”

“... part of this enterprise, and in Williams’s hands it becomes a subtle appreciation of ideas that may be fundamentally unlike anything we could think now, but that also help us to understand our own ideas better. Two of his best books were on historical subjects: Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1978) and Shame and Necessity (1993), a profound study of ...”