“... a book that makes you want to weep. Red Storm Rising has been on or near the top of the American best-seller lists for well over a year now. Before its run is over, the book will have sold the better part of three million copies in cloth and paperback. It is, in fact, the second huge success for Tom Clancy Jr, a 46-year-old former insurance broker from the ...”

“... will never die (‘I had thought – secretly I was certain – that life goes on and on’). His best argument for immortality has always been sex. To live has been to fuck and to fuck has been to live. As the chances fade for dynamic sexual relations with a woman so does his sense of being alive. Without a woman, Roth’s Everyman is discovered to have no ...”

“... meaning is life itself: ‘Such a good thing, life! Such a wonderful idea for God to have had! The best idea there had ever been,’ as Mrs Curren puts it in Age of Iron (1990). And then there is the soul – a word that, together with ‘heart’, is central to Coetzee’s vocabulary. The complacent and self-serving deviousness of human personality is ...”

“... to extend their possibilities, and they were willing to uproot themselves in order to do so. Nicholas Lemann’s judicious, well-written study concentrates on the poor blacks of Clarksdale, Mississippi, who moved to Chicago. The invention and production of cotton-picking machines had begun to undercut the value of their work, while Chicago, deprived of ...”

“... had seen ‘dramaturgy’ at work in German theatres and knew something of what Edmund Tracey and Nicholas John had been doing at the English National Opera. No one did that kind of thing at Covent Garden, and the mail I received suggested that others, too, thought it was high time they started. Those in the House were less certain. An opera house is a trade ...”

“... of the young wife whose husband is thinking of the price of the cloth a pedlar is showing her. Nicholas Tromans, in his catalogue essay, writes: ‘Wilkie’s contemporaries valued his early work as dearly as any British art has ever been cherished, but it remains for us to recognise and appreciate what he went on to achieve.’* We can try, but it can be ...”

“... the uncannily sure-footed and the hysterically overblown. Is early, nature-fixated Hughes best, red in tooth and claw, or the minatory spinner of parables in Crow of 1970, or should the palm go to the bestselling Birthday Letters, in which Hughes told his side of ‘the most tragic literary love story of our time’, to borrow the headline on the 17 ...”

“... to explain the exceptional achievements of French woodcarving in this period – achievements best exemplified by the luxury picture-frame. Two qualities are especially remarkable in such work: refinements of texture and sheen (and addition of fine sand to some surfaces, the scratching of hatched and cross-hatched patterns into the gesso covering the ...”

“... marginalised. A new study was needed, consolidating and reviewing the evidence, and this is what Nicholas Roe offers. He claims no startling discoveries, but he brings together in one place much scattered information and a few new details from Godwin’s papers. His treatment of the tradition of Dissent in Cambridge fills out what Schneider, Chard and others ...”

“... in guarding our liberty against it. Yet if a society is corrupted, a powerful ruler may be the best, or even the only, instrument of its reform. Weak monarchy, which becomes the prey of faction or oligarchy, may be a larger threat to liberty than strong monarchy, just as it may be a graver impediment to a policy abroad that preserves freedom (or ...”

“... sky to fall. The markets were re-opening after the weekend when the world first heard the name of Nicholas Leeson, the man who broke the bank in Singapore. It’s hard to remember how that dawn felt – now that we have reassured ourselves at the building society, peeped with relief beneath the mattress, patted the nest-egg – but the mood then was that the ...”

“... points out, Martin Luther’s objections to gifts being given to children in the name of Saint Nicholas prompted him to introduce Christkindlein – ‘the little Christ child’, a messenger of Christ – as the gift-bringer. (Belk doesn’t point out the historical irony whereby mispronunciation transformed Luther’s spiritual pinch-hitter into Kris ...”

“... his portrayal of the ‘guilty men’ of British appeasement as honest men doing their unheroic best in an impossible situation, would have been anathema to him. Namier may have helped to erect a fresh 20th-century myth, but in his Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) he ...”

“... Eliza Pinckney averred that she ‘would not cross that frightful ocean’ again ‘for the best fortune in England’. But was this enough to create the peculiar synchronicity of Hampshire/New Hampshire? Probably not. The six authors in Colonial Identity rightly stress the immediate political, religious and economic links between the criollos and the ...”

“... an explosive device, particularly if the cover of the book it ostensibly contains has a savage Nicholas Garland illustration of a wild horseman wielding a bloody scimitar, surrounded by the decapitated victims of his havoc. If the poems of Manila Envelope are explosive, the manifesto makes its plea for them obliquely. Pawky, wry, epigrammatic and ...”