“... At one point, the narrator tries to find his copy of Kafka’s ‘Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way’ and finally finds the quotation he wants. ‘The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice.’ Isolation has no choice either, but art like Francis Wyndham’s can turn it into a fantasy as innocently moving ...”

“... a man who doesn’t want the child his wife is pregnant with, was published here last year in Christopher Middleton’s translation.* More recently, PN Review published Gert Hofmann’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, a short story translated by his son, about the return of a poet to his father’s house: the son begs the father for ...”

“... of a film like Theorem, he was making common cause with the vulgar imagination and placing his hope in its vigour, in what he perceived to be its unabashed appetites and its laughter. The Arabian Nights, which sadly seems to have survived in this country only in a mutilated and dubbed print, is a period piece of Seventies hedonism. It opens with a jostling ...”

“... of 22 August a young man looking like Hanratty had come to her house hoping to find lodgings. Christopher Larman had gone to the police when he saw Hanratty’s picture in the paper, certain that this was the man he had directed to Mrs Jones’s on a summer evening in 1961, the night before he left for London. When I finally tracked Larman down in ...”

“... of a great city’, Isherwood saw that this was indeed ‘only a façade’, but it’s one that Christopher Banks, the young English detective who is the starchy narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, can’t see behind. He remembers leaving Shanghai as a boy with the discomfiting feeling that the city might never reveal the mystery of his mother and ...”

“... Watt, observed, ‘it is very difficult ... not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.’ The hope that a change of clothes will actually redress our situation is not therefore entirely vain, in either sense of the word. In the 20th century, of which three of these books offer surveys, the appearance of men altered relatively little while women’s was ...”

“... in any further cause than hostility to the supremacy of Charles I had done. For example, did Christopher Feake and William Walwyn stand for ‘the radical cause’, or did they stand for two causes as sharply opposed to each other as they were to Charles I? Was Walwyn, admirer of Montaigne and precursor of Mill, a natural ally of Feake, who believed in ...”

“... can replace or displace the texts it is drawn to. He has always had strong preferences – for Christopher Smart, for Wordsworth, for Keats, for Freud, for Derrida – that are not sponsored by complementary hatreds, and he has written some of the most distinguished literary criticism of his time without sounding embattled, or outraged, or even ...”

“... he called at his house, he said: ‘Guys, what about launching a paper?’ We decided we would and Christopher Logue was deputed to go to what’s now the British Library to look into possible names. I’d said: ‘I’m totally opposed to traditional left names – “Workers’ this”, or “Socialist that”. The people who are coming into politics are not ...”

“... that yesterday’s B-movie ham could be in charge of all our tomorrows. The campaign so far – I hope this much has seeped across the Atlantic – has scarcely done credit to the issues distinguishing the decade ahead from the single-issue elections of the last twenty years. Carter has refused to debate Edward Kennedy, and now John Anderson, and thus ...”

“... my feet and hands were growing numb, so I climbed down without reaching the top. Another night, I hope.Battersea, in fact, is a fairly simple climb, made ready by the builders who are destroying it. I began night climbing at Oxford, with a few friends, crawling out of windows and up drainpipes – the circular ones, never the more ornate square ones, which ...”

“... and Ray most explicitly – that post-structuralism has altered our habits of thought beyond hope of a return to the innocence of unreflective origins. Bernstein sees this predominance of theory as a symptom of the modern, alienated consciousness forced to reflect upon its own belatedness vis-à-vis the simple satisfactions of first-order narrative. Ray ...”

“... Hasenclever for conveying in one image a state of affairs that a progressive writer could only hope to analyse over many pages of print. Questions about social rights, poverty and the right to work tore the revolutions apart during the summer of 1848.A third point: as a non-linear, convulsive, intermittently violent and transformative ‘unfinished ...”

“... the story ends on a note of post-Catholic optimism. Still, it’s hard not to suspect that hope for the distant future is being used to license a programme of angry satire directed at humanity as presently constituted. At one point an atomic scientist comes to Chad to throw his weight behind Morel. Asked by a journalist if he’s disgusted by ...”

“... is repetition itself that is the problem, that signifies trauma. This is one of the paradoxes that Christopher Bollas and Malcom Bowie examine in their differently eloquent and intriguing books. Embarrassed alike by the subtlety and complexity of the work of art and of the patient, can the theorist and the analyst do more than repeat what they already know? Is ...”