“... 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 ...”

“... Hamlet appeared in three. For readers since the 18th century, the narrative poems have been at best marginal to the Shakespeare canon. The sonnets, on the other hand, which were the least known of his non-dramatic poems until the end of the 18th century, had by the 20th century become essential to the construction of the canonical Shakespeare. This ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the Athenian sculptor Phidias, celebrated in his lifetime for the statue of Zeus at Olympia but best known today for his work on the Acropolis.We know that he was born in Athens around 500 BC and was still active in the late 430s. We can’t be sure what he looked like, though there are some possibilities on display: a marble bust, discovered just outside ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”