“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... Beauchamp’s Career, Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Mann’s Magic Mountain and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, characters sit around and converse about – precisely – the issues which are exercising similar figures in the real world. Indeed, to debate issues is made their main activity, and the only reason the author has brought them into being. Here is the ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... psychological principles, but his interest in the decision theories of the American psychologist Ward Edwards brought him into contact with Kahneman in 1969. According to Edwards the human mind was naturally Bayesian: it assessed probabilities more or less accurately according to a set of principles that allowed it to combine new information with existing ...”

“... it: it’s forceful, direct and straightforward in style, and depicts a woman in a psychiatric ward in conflict with her doctor, nurses and herself. Although she uses elements of detective stories and thrillers in her earlier novels, Quin is not interested in narrative for its own sake; indeed she delights in failing to supply the kind of closure such ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous plankton, and a ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from ...”

“... experiences than ever before. ‘Since Christmas,’ Accidia wrote in 1955, ‘we calculate that John has spoken to over four hundred people – I to about four, and those would be the dustman, fishman, policeman and the woman from one of the Harewood Estate lodges.’ The life of the postwar married woman, diminished and degraded as it was, was whipped up ...”

“... to which this reduced her. Lucia had enough to feel resentful about. Born in the pauper’s ward of a Trieste hospital, she grew up in an impecunious family which was continually shifting from one cramped rented room to another. They endured serial evictions, and Joyce often enough found himself without pen or ink. He was Mr Micawber without the ...”

“... memorialist or seanchaidh, whose stories were edited into a book by the great Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell. Her words had gone on buzzing and irking in a corner of my brain. Most sources are agreed that the people left Pabbay and the last two islands in the chain, Mingulay and Berneray, quite freely, in a final despair at the harshness of the ...”

“... followed by the long anticlimax of the returning veteran, and the melancholy half-life of the TB ward. These shade into the unhappy husbands of the 1950s and 1960s, with their deadening but precarious white-collar jobs, and their drinking problems. The few excursions away from these areas – there are stories set in Hollywood, and stories about political ...”

“... honest and sober’ would win riches. He left the inevitable corollary to preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher: ‘If men have not enough it is from want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality. No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his sin.’ This moral economy nourishes a distinctive ...”

“... historian and poet, an old friend of the Aschersons, was lying in a bed nearby. ‘Later in the ward,’ Ascherson writes, I was talking to my mother about the Ballymeanoch stones, and the one that fell, and saying that nobody seemed sure when it had fallen. A muffled voice came from behind me. ‘Well, I know!’ said Marion, suddenly awake. ‘It was in ...”

“... had the social and intellectual distinctionof some famous Brigadiers from elsewhere: Julian Bell, John Cornford or André Malraux. But their motives for fighting were large – larger than Spain. As one old volunteer told Hochschild, ‘For us it wasn’t Franco … it was always Hitler.’ Before the populations of the democracies woke up to what was at ...”