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“... Marian frame – as an illustration of a popular story from the Apocrypha, which has the infant John the Baptist, in flight from Herod’s executioners, come across Christ on his flight into Egypt. Though never was Egypt like this. Maybe the trigger for the temple of boulders was a line from the Song of Songs: ‘My dove in the clefts of rocks (in ...”

“... made up of Dictaphones whose continual playback forms a protective wall around him, a shark-cage within which his identity might be preserved. He then goes to ground, seeking out members of the Un-Space Exploration Committee in text-lined subterranean labyrinths accessed through a trapdoor in the shelves of the Manchester Deansgate branch of ...”

“... three hundred years, and the whole lay-out of this ad-hoc theatre, with the Queen in a high glass cage before them, addressed personally, and any other audience only let creep in along the sides, made it the strangest performance they were ever going to take part in. The mad king of Bavaria could not get what they were getting. And so I went on. I next found ...”

“... a suitable retort to Scruton – ‘When we want you to chirp up matey, we’ll rattle the cage’ – and Reading himself deals with the accusation of gratuitous violence: ‘Too black and over the top, though, is what the Actual often happens to be.’ The book’s bleak epigraph says that ‘few atrocities of which H. sap can conceive remain ...”

“... casa.’ Uninvited by Bill Clinton to join other high-achieving Italian-Americans, such as Nicolas Cage, Martin Scorsese and ex-baseball player Joe Garagiola, at the bean-feast held in honour of President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Corso is typecast as an involuntary amnesia case, a sleeve-tugger of enormous charm. A street poet in an age that has no use for poets ...”

“... rants (trashing the proles), small revenges. The Modernist experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have ...”

“... to that of an analyst to his patients: cultivated negative capability. But negative capability, as John Bayley has frequently pointed out, cannot, by definition, be cultivated. Absence consciously striven for becomes conspicuous. A Late Divorce has no controlling narrator, but Yehoshua is present on every page of it: as the man performing the vanishing ...”

“... It is not its only crisis. British books on the subject fail singularly to discuss the ‘iron cage of bondage’ which the social state has created: that is to say, the process of bureaucratisation which has de-personalised the most personal service of the modern state. Few functions of the modern state are more miserably associated with ...”

“... version, above, the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations (by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text, they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect) intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to find out what is ...”

“... his career as a naturalist: his father, and his scientific mentor, the Cambridge professor John Henslow. While Desmond and Moore’s style was colourful, punchy and occasionally melodramatic, liberally embellished with exclamation marks, the tone of Browne’s writing, though no less vivid, is often lightly ironic. She has Darwin showing off to Henslow ...”

“... A makeshift bed was set up on the terrace overlooking San Giovanni, with its statues of Christ and John the Baptist. A frozen winter light hung over the church and wisps of mist blew off the statues. I lay on the bed wrapped in my raincoat and tried to sleep. The rooftop had a high wire-mesh fence round it to prevent patients from jumping off. (In November ...”

“... other than any other people I know are about their colleagues,’ Sarah observes in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), Drabble’s first novel. ‘I hate anyone to be didactic except me.’ ‘Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.’In comparison with lines like these, Byatt sometimes seems to ...”

“... fashion outlets (usually chimerical).Brown does not look far beyond the lifers in their pinchbeck cage and the sordid galère of dependent hangers-on staring through the bars: secular confessors, commentators, scriptwriters, ‘insiders’, ‘historians’, informal advisers, scum-of-the-earth journalists whose expertise is in stalking and having ...”

“... fish guts. But rather than a beautiful youth, the earl is a ‘foetal ape’ imprisoned in a cage, who repeatedly rapes his centuries-old housekeeper. After Many a Summer both suffers and benefits from the unresolved tension between the demands of satire and mysticism. The novel reuses the ‘country house’ form that allowed Huxley, in early novels ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”