“... 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 last hundred years that women could easily get to art school and train as designers. This may explain the relatively late development of the type of fabric pictures produced nowadays by, for instance, the Glasgow School of Art: delightful mixtures of colours and textures combining fabric, beads and stitchwork. Rozsika Parker wishes to emphasise that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Londoners have visited New York City, but what do we know of Albany? The citizens of Manhattan may tell us that Albany is a square, conservative place, snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... doesn’t seem too bold to suggest that the book isn’t deeply concerned with moral problems, and may not be aspiring to depth in the first place. (This is not the same as calling it shallow.) It sets out, though with no announcement of the fact, to open up a particular sort of imaginative, even imaginary space, though there are McEwan themes that seem to ...”

“... be of a good beliefe.’ ‘Nay, we must go further than hope well,’ Theologus replies. ‘We may not venture our salvation upon uncertaine hopes. As, if a man should hope it would be a faire day tomorrow; but he cannot certainly tell. No, no. We must in this case, being of such infinite importance as it is, grow to some certainty and full ...”

“... hit in Russia, where it won two literary prizes, and in Germany. One explanation for this may be that the reading public has a greater appetite for experimental fiction than the cynics believe. Another may be the nature of Shishkin’s experiment, which relates to the enclosure, rather than to the entirety of its ...”

“... Even when we meet with a fact about the artist (and there are a good many new ones here) – it may be about the family timber business, about the artist’s investments in land, about his endless pursuit of benefices for his unworthy son Pomponio or of emoluments for himself – we seem to be considering commonplace behaviour rather than anything ...”

“... 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 ...”