“... uses the word to say what he doesn’t understand about the mild manners of children who die young.                     Murderers are easy to understand. But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is ...”

“... tomb of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by arts that penetrate the collective cultural psyche’, and he seems ...”

“... working in some less restrained modern poetic structures, such as those of MacDiarmid or Auden or David Jones, but not in Shakespearean sonnets: ‘unvermiculated’, ‘penetralian’, ‘exuriate’, ‘cineritious’, ‘intercrural’, ‘rupetral concentricity’, ‘cerebellic souterrain’. ‘The Price of Stone’ reeks of the oil-lamp. Murphy’s ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... actually did that awful thing described in the ‘Salad Days’ section of My Life as a Man to a young lady under the ping-pong table, yelping ‘good shot’ and ‘nice return’ to allay her parents next door, will be disappointed. The Facts contains not a single lavatorial or sex scene. No family liver is profaned. Roth, being Roth, cannot keep the facts ...”

“... sometimes.’ We are also in the dead waters, barring the entrance to the Gulf of Siam, where the young narrator in The Shadow-Line, enjoying his first command, is so agonisingly becalmed, till he is left with a ship’s crew of so many fevered skeletons. We have here, plainly, an experience or vision of the utmost importance to Conrad’s imagination. In ...”

“... published much later in Obscure Destinies. It reflects the poignant discontent of Victoria (the young Willa), living too close to the crowded miseries of an always-pregnant mother, an improvident father, an obediently slavish Southern grandmother. Willie Cather Jr, as she signed herself in her books, yearned to leave for the University of Nebraska, and was ...”

“... in Petrograd from Finland to trigger off the Revolution. A book recommended by many experts is David Shub’s Lenin: A Biography. It has much to recommend it, not least that Shub was a member of the Bolshevik Party in 1905 when Lenin was its leader and knew him and many other prominent actors in the Revolution very well. But few openings to a novel about ...”

“... with whom she identifies. The secure sense of national identity came from her father: ‘David was an Adam,’ she wrote of him. ‘Australia was his prolific and innocent garden.’She was forty years away but always on the move, living (to put the places in roughly chronological order), in London, Paris, Spain, Hollywood, New ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... is that ‘attacks on the use of race as a concept’ appear to anti-racist writers like David Roediger as a ‘distressingly new’ critique of anti-racism, all the more unsettling because it comes from the left – which Racecraft does. In her brilliant essay of 1990, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’ (reprinted in ...”

“... to the designer atheism of the early 21st century, with a nice sideswipe at the pornography of David Attenborough’s nature programmes thrown in:‘Isn’t there something faintly repellent about a posse of cameramen training their sights on a python slowly swallowing an antelope or on a coot killing her surplus ...”

“... has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually accounts for about 11 per cent of the electorate, contributed 18 per cent of the total vote, splitting 66 to 32 in Obama’s favour.) These groups are now the most disillusioned and apathetic, and feel ...”

“... gigantic flying bear, ‘the de facto ruler of our city’. The novel begins when the narrator, a young woman called Rachel, is picking through Mord’s matted fur while he’s asleep, and discovers a strange creature ‘like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid’. She takes the creature home, names him Borne, and teaches him to talk. Feeding on lizards and ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”