“... as their children did not, the kind of country they were living in. Unlike Roberto Bolaño, a young adult at the time of the coup, or José Donoso, then at the height of his fame, these writers didn’t experience military rule as a rupture with the past but as the unremarkable norm. This has resulted in a very specific strain of metafiction, concerned ...”

“... much a rich man’s plaything. In 1954, however, it had the good fortune to be bought by a wealthy young barrister who, initially at least, brought to it the same benevolent rule as editor-proprietor that David Astor exercised on the Observer. It was at this stage that Inglis was lucky enough to join it – having leapt on ...”

“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”

“... case of a family who were asked by an army patrol for the loan of a cooking-pot. The soldiers were young conscripts who had been out in the hills for three days. They lent them the pot and gave them two plantains to put in the soup. Next morning the ELN appeared. They took the father of the family, tied him to a tree, and tortured him in front of his wife and ...”

“... but by 1930 the increasingly unscrupulous High Command was sufficiently interested in the young man for him to be appointed professor of immunology at the Tokyo Army Medical School. He also gained the support of an eminent military scientist, Koizumi Chikahiko, who fancied himself as a humanist as well as a patriot. His slogan, Sheldon Harris tells ...”

“... for the ‘Things ain’t what they used to be’ section): ‘That an increasing number of young men from Eton and the other major public schools should have done things like photography, interior decoration, or art-dealing in preference to the traditional service careers was to a certain extent the result of Britain’s withdrawal from India and other ...”

“... consider the facts without venturing to interpret them. One of the first accounts of Buchenwald, David Rousset’s L’Univers Concentrationnaire, is rather weak on facts, but offers a welter of interpretations – glorifying the strength and discipline of organised Communism in the camp, yet making the connection with Kafka, Ubu and the ‘absurd’. This ...”

“... believer than the secular intellectuals he sneered at? The evidence is inconclusive. Although as a young man he had considered ordination, the more the older Cowling obsessed over religion the less he seemed to be interested in Christianity as either transcendence or moral guide. Instead, like a plumber seeking the appropriate rod for unblocking a drain, he ...”

“... comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next to them, in apposition) ‘duplication which leads through democratic crowds to totalitarian unison’. I thought this was coming it a bit. There are only three outstretched arms in ...”

“... thus the index of intransigent and triumphant counter-revolution. Not surprisingly, a nucleus of young British post-structuralists have drifted towards Marxist activism or have addressed themselves to film rather than literature. Film narrative, given its corporate ownership and diffuse studio origins, has no obtrusive author to deal with. (The early Screen ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... like a stock Yiddish character. It is never entirely clear what he is up to. We know that as a young man he moved to Moscow because he was a Communist. But he may have been involved there in something more sinister than tailoring; he may be mad; he may have intended to murder the fashion magnate and fled from a bad conscience. Two American couples are also ...”

“... more hitting. Becker, too, wore everybody out, fraying tempers and reducing Bollertieri’s top young prospects (one of them Tommy Haas, the new German hope) to wrecks. Becker hired Bollettieri in 1993, when his career was flagging. What made Becker different was that he was a grown-up: ‘a guy who’s very methodical, a guy who’s very neat, who takes ...”