“... succession of overlaid associations and reappropriated meanings. Precisely because Che died so young and in combat, and because his literary remains are so unrevised and fragmentary, he can avoid all the failure and discredit that a 67-year-old Ernesto Guevara de la Serna would have had to tackle in his memoirs. Perhaps there is now enough hard evidence to ...”

“... O’. Her price, 5s. ‘She riggles her a—e su’ cantily.’ The description of this prime young filly, taken from the Edinburgh publication A Genuine List of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 ...”

“... for it seems to me that these 480 large pages constitute a crib-cum-sourcebook for any academic young person with access to 25 pounds. Merely to list the topics treated in one section of the book, that devoted to the structure of language, is to indicate material for a primary course in general and applied linguistics: linguistic levels, typology and ...”

“... though, are the sensuous ‘Dream of Zinc Cream’, on body-surfing, and Mr James’s tribute to Robert Hughes’s magnificent The Fatal Shore, the book in which the story of the convicts in Australia, related in many accounts, is finally unforgettably told. This essay is amongst other things a passionate defence of the benefits expatriation has brought to a ...”

“... post-war foreign policy ‘establishment’: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy and Averell Harriman. All were men whose influence derived less from their official station than from their social position, their professional and intellectual accomplishments, their personal prestige and their friendship with one ...”

“... have the scars to show for it’. He is doubtless thinking of his earlier novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), and two collections of stories, Unions (1911) and Three Women (1924). Perhaps also of his plays, The Enthusiasts (1921) and Vinzenz and the Girlfriend of Important Men (1924), and a great many articles and essays. He would like now to ...”

“... the grounds that a 21-year-old Jane Austen would not speak of Charlotte Lucas, aged 27, ‘as “a young woman”, whereas a lady in her thirties could easily do so’. Authors cannot be held to blame for the boasts of their blurbs. Still, the claim that the professor’s is ‘the first comprehensive critical biography of Jane Austen for half a century’ is ...”

“... this case it was the famous romantic novel by Bernardin de St Pierre, Paul et Virginie, in which a young couple are brought up together in the beauties of the tropic wilderness, are all in all to each other, and die together before any hint of sexuality can appear in their relations. William knew the book well, and so did Dorothy. This has been mentioned ...”

“... the story’s most appealing character, a refugee from the works of Calvino’s favourite writer, Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Trelawney it is who performs the operation. This is a happy ending, but for the story’s youthful narrator it is also the moment of childhood’s end: Dr Trelawney, the tippling medic, leaves on a British ship, ‘hitched on board ...”

“... Fiction from Godwin to Doyle, shows how much more the public hoped for from its police.2 Sir Robert Peel had insisted that a policeman should have neither ‘the rank, habits or station of a gentleman’. The English policeman has always had a lower than average level of education, and has generally been paid less than a skilled worker. You can hire a ...”

“... the author carried out the research for this book when he was a graduate student of the late Robert Mandrou, a historian of mentalities who had himself been a pupil of Lucien Febvre. Like his friend Marc Bloch, Febvre was a kind of historical anthropologist who insisted on the otherness of the past, and on the need to study the unspoken assumptions in ...”

“... writers and critics came and went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel ...”

“... All that seems clear is that it was someone who admired Gilbert Elliot of Minto and was annoyed by Robert Dundas of Arniston, second Lord President. Quite a lot of Scottish writers on politics might fulfil these requirements. The militia was attractive to upper-class society because of the opportunities it gave for the exertion of patronage, to the ...”

“... Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American ...”