“... is every bit as immobilised; notice in the following lines Merrill’s ‘always’, the bell-jar dropped over the paralysed moment: Always The moment comes to gaze As the tall emblem pivots and rides out To the opposite side, always ... By 1962, with the publication of Water Street, Merrill had hit his stride. Now he could find perfection, or at ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his hand to get it.’ This selfishness was not a reversion to ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker seems to have none. No more does she ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... Royal Africa Company to salvage a sunken treasure-ship off the Sussex coast, designing a diving-bell for the purpose, and going down in it himself. From 1698 to 1701, he was master and commander of the tiny Royal Navy ship Paramore, again in the South Atlantic. This was, it has been said, ‘the first sea journey undertaken for a purely scientific ...”

“... produced such constitutional anomalies as the interruption of legal argument when the division bell rang (something I witnessed more than once as a barrister) so that one or more of the law lords could go and vote in the chamber.It is against this background that Frederic Reynold’s story of what he calls high principle and low politics begins. Reynold, a ...”

“... She believes that Gödel’s theorems were designed to refute the formalist programme of David Hilbert, according to which mathematics is just an arbitrary human creation, ‘a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper’. Wrong, wrong, wrong! But we can see how Goldstein was misled. There is no doubt that the ...”

“... of Manning’s teens. The Braybrookes tell us that ‘she used to have dreams in which Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia came floating towards her like beautiful swans.’ An assiduous user of the public library, the young Olivia took out Jacob’s Room almost as soon as it arrived there. But her tastes were catholic: Rider Haggard’s Zulu Trilogy ...”

“... advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public ...”

“... summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York’ (The Bell Jar). Good ones can do ordinary and extraordinary at once; they can do the novel in miniature. Grant seems to know what the sentence can do for her but fails to do anything special with it, other than set the scene. Even the thought seems run of the ...”

“... state liable to pay damages for serious abuses of power. The leading British commentary, Brown and Bell, holds that ‘the surprising feature’ of French administrative law, given its Napoleonic origin, is the fact that ‘it has survived to provide one of the most systematic guarantees of the liberties of the individual against the state anywhere in the ...”

“... door so I answer the door.’ The ‘tall, sturdily built African-American woman’ who rang the bell asks if she can use his phone to call the police because her car has broken down. He lets her in, and she’s soon followed by a man with a gun. They crack his skull, tie him up, and empty his apartment of valuables. But the thieves don’t have room in ...”

“... leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the site quibbled with local activists who held that it was important to memorialise the fact that Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved woman forced to work for ...”