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“... in the Feuillets are lighter. The narrator catches sight of some girls at the seaside, and we see straight away what attracts the narrator to them: they don’t pay any attention to him. They are creatures ‘for whom the rest of the universe seemed not to exist’. ‘They all had a grace, an elegance, an agility, a disdainful pride … which made of them a ...”

“... of having got rid of it. In rhetorical questions, for example. We know they’re not literal or straight – that’s what the phrase means. But what if they were literal, what if their grammar overcame their usage? I can say, ‘What do you mean?’ to signify ‘How dare you?’ or ‘What are you referring to?’ or ‘What is the sense of that ...”

“... seem that the more Coetzee’s novels make use of the essay form the more his essays settle into a straight and sober version of the genre. A 1999 piece on Musil, for example, included in Stranger Shores (2001), opens: ‘Born in the autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and ...”

“... chew gum. To pass through the eye of a needle and enter heaven. No wonder it takes the patients straight out of the poem, leaving the speaker with the self-interrogation which, one senses, he has been avoiding as hard as he can. From shame, from weakness, from ‘shakiness’ – a condition referred to in one of the other poems – or perhaps from lifelong ...”

“... is a scoundrel,’ Dostoevsky wrote in his notes for The Brothers Karamazov, ‘but stupidity is straight and honest.’ This wasn’t what he himself thought, or rather, it was only one of the things he thought. In the novel the line is given to Ivan Karamazov, who explains to his younger brother Alyosha that he began their conversation about religion ‘as ...”

“... and sees that they are decidedly mediocre. But that is not all he sees: ‘I saw too, as it were straight through them, the possibility of doing better … It was the first day of the world … It was the morning of the first day.’ For the completed upbeat ending, we would need a second narrative time, the one where Jake tells us that he did indeed do ...”

“... Elsa Strietman) and on the politics of the silent cinema – predictably, but with much insight, Michael Minden concentrates on Dr Caligari and Battleship Potemkin – is straight-forward. Here the undergraduate, for instance, will find much of use. Minden’s discriminations between Brecht and Eisenstein are finely ...”

“... buy postcards, read guides and the works of previous travellers in the hope of getting what we see straight and retaining it. Yet those very tests and aides-mémoire will distort and decay the experience. Sebald’s narrator has doubts even deeper than Beyle’s. ‘The more images I gathered from the past ... the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past ...”

“... Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France used to be, we are not yet the ...”

“... three years of intensive negotiations, has slipped from the collective memory. This is odd. As Michael Cotey Morgan points out in his fascinating new book, it was a conference with grand objectives, most notably a final settlement of the Second World War, just as Vienna had forged a settlement after the Napoleonic Wars and Paris had tried to come to terms ...”

“... be as slight or profound as you like – it’s still loss, and therefore what we’re all about. Michael Bywater knows this. His Lost Worlds regrets the passing of Beans, Grandpa (‘My maternal grandfather is four ways lost. He is dead. He was a man of Monmouthshire. He was a steel man. He was an industrial craftsman. You don’t get much more lost than ...”

“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... scant regard to the Cold War: American behaviour and motivation can, for her, be charted as a straight line from the emergence of the US as the world’s dominant power in the 1940s to the Bush Administration of today. In a book firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition, she is guilty of a rather schematic view of history; the details barely detain her. For ...”

“... the new Lord Chief Justice an example, for his Dimbleby Lecture, of the law’s ability to play a straight bat. A book may be lurking there, as it must in many other corners of the legal attic. Brian Simpson himself embarked on such an enterprise some years ago with the 19th-century case, known to every law student, of the Crown v. Dudley and Stephens – the ...”