“... Smithers calls his gloomy analysis ‘Japan as a Laboratory for Economic Theory’ because no major economy has ever run up such an extraordinary peacetime debt, or had so few ideas about how to ease its burden.Last year, the 171-year-old Sogo Department Store, Tokyo’s Bloomingdale’s, closed its doors well before Japan’s heavily commercialised ...”

“... musical training at an age when Berlioz had never used a piano or heard an orchestra. According to John Deathridge, Wagner wanted posterity to view him as an autodidact; but this claim should not be taken, as it apparently is by Cairns, at face value. He is right, of course, that Berlioz’s early years were not wasted for they contributed indispensable ...”

“... favourite producers and directors (David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough, Hugh Hudson, Roland Joffe, John Boorman) and its financial supporters. Shadowing the whole business, of course, is the dubious issue of the revival of the British film industry, for which Goldcrest had to bear all the hopes and finally, unfairly, carry the can. Terry Ilott’s conclusions ...”

“... aspires to a sharing – if not an invasion – of other people’s privacy. More than any other major contemporary writer, she remains loyal to the social mission that a 19th-century realist such as George Eliot professed. But both she and J.M. Coetzee confront the situation of present-day South Africa in which, under the National Party and its possible ...”

“... far more interestingly, as a dense and far-ranging discussion of knowledge, and as the source of major epistemological issues and debates from the Hellenistic period to modern times. Burnyeat sees the function of his Introduction as being that of encouraging the reader to find in the first dialogue, Socrates’s dialogue with Theaetetus, the spur to a second ...”

“... productive and interesting personnel with those of others excluded from attention. The book’s major strength, which ought to have been capitalised upon to a greater extent, is its use of the personal testimony of élite gardeners culled mainly from the various gardening magazines. This is turned to good use in many places, particularly in the discussion ...”

“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”

“... return but who had in the meantime transmuted from vivacious satirist to plodding bore. Upward’s major work, A Spiral Ascent, came out in three parts between 1962 and 1977, breaking a silence that had lasted since the early Forties, when he joined the Communist Party (he left it in 1948). The trilogy presents the saga of its artist-hero’s joining and ...”

“... and sustain the inertia they claim to despise. From this charge Brian O’Nolan is exempt. His major work, At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman, exemplifies an aesthetic process both innovative and destructive without parallel among his contemporaries. That dominance of the aesthetic places O’Nolan in the tradition of Joyce and Beckett, a position ...”

“... though they have knowledge of each other’s work and exchange compliments through their friend John Kenyon. The 573 letters of the courtship alone (1845-6) lie ahead; further on are the rich records of the Brownings’ life in Italy, and then the less familiar, and therefore more often surprising, documents of Browning’s later years. (Here, too, the ...”

“... Santa Cruz County, 333 were in Watsonville, as were 553 of the 2438 buildings countywide suffering major damage. We walked along Lincoln St and at first all seemed well, aside from tumbled chimneys announcing the folly of building with brick in California. Then there’d be a swath of disaster: boarded-up windows, porches askew, red tags on the front door ...”

“... in particular the mongoloid type or Down’s syndrome, first identified at Earlswood by Dr John Langdon Down. There was, however, more to this transformation than the mere growth of administrative protocol. Long-term shifts were occurring in the philosophy of what constituted idiotism, as is outlined here in a superb essay by C.J. Goodey. Theologians ...”

“... Spain, Germany and the Americas; its characters a Croatian Catholic priest called Draganovic and Major Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced that no papers would be ...”

“... led to a reconsideration of their practice as teachers. The book’s editors, Stephen Eyers and John Richmond, suggest what this work meant for them as teachers: ‘The study of language in schools is not essentially to do with the reading of reports or the shaping of policy documents (though the presence of reports and the need for statements of policy may ...”

“... of the picture’s export from Italy was raised. Meanwhile, the attribution to Raphael made by John Shearman, the prominent Raphael scholar who was then at the Courtauld Institute, was widely challenged, sometimes in very strong terms. And then the picture had to be returned to Italy. It must have seemed as if the Museum of Fine Arts had been copped for ...”