“... published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by eminent Anglophone or Continental writers but without much discussion of the nature of autobiographical form. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and ...”

“... Pietro Germi, Anatole Litvak, Jean Painlevé, Gillo Pontecorvo, Nicholas Roeg, George Rouquier, John Schlesinger, Henri Storck, John Sturges and Arne Sucksdorff. And what are we to make of those who are mentioned in the text, but not favoured with individual entries? Pioneers like the Lumière brothers; veterans like ...”

“... take Nuttall’s point to be that our age differs from that of Herbert, or Milton, or Dante, or St John the Evangelist (his chief subjects, in order of appearance), in that the matter would in earlier times have been taken for granted as a simple truth, and would not have required a Borgesian elaboration to bring it out. God the reader, if you like, was taken ...”

“... should do things much less ambiguously: their acts cannot be filtered through the head of John Dowell, the rich American simpleton (if indeed that is what he is) who tells the story. Moreover Dowell has to be there with the others, objectively represented as well as in voice-over; and it is beyond the power of any actor to play an impotent bonehead ...”

“... theorist. More information about the actual world of politics is available in a slighter book. John Tomlinson, a Labour MP who lost his seat in 1979, has collected a large ragbag of useful if undigested facts about the ultra-Right and ultra-Left movements in Britain and about their activities in recent years. Anyone seeking the genealogy of the rival ...”

“... joke, a book to go with the pretty china on the dresser. So one is almost too grateful to turn to John Yeoman’s and Quentin Blake’s The Wild Washerwomen, and should say at once that the drawings show no astounding virtuosity in the re-creation of textures, that the words have no overtones of poetry, that it aims only to tell a funny story with a twist in ...”

“... elections of the last twenty years. Carter has refused to debate Edward Kennedy, and now John Anderson, and thus Reagan. Reagan in turn has been bound and gagged by his advisers, their hostage rather than their boss, in the apparent belief that he cannot live up to the media pitches devised by them on his behalf. There has hardly, therefore, been ...”

“... Gordon Williams, formerly Gordon M. Williams: born 1934, educated at the John Neilson Institution in Paisley. Worked in Scotland as a farm labourer and newspaper reporter before undergoing National Service in Germany with the RAF. Has worked as a novelist for 16 years, based mainly in Soho but with a spell of rural isolation on the edge of Dartmoor ...”

“... fell to the ground. Now it turns out that I have confessed to two. Where are the other four? John Bright used to be something like a hero for me. Now I am not so sure. He made the finest speeches in English, better even than Burke’s. But he was pompous and liked the company of dukes too much. Still, he had better stay on the list. I have three names to ...”

“... and yet it cannot be denied that a sense of the traditional form is essential to their work. John Hewitt’s book, Kites in Spring, containing his reminiscences of a Belfast boyhood, consists of more than a hundred sonnets, but these are disappointingly unadventurous in their scope and could, formally speaking, have been written by any textbook ...”

“... language developed by the Oxford School of Philosophers’ – especially, one may add, by John Austin. Unfortunately Dr Harré finds it necessary to develop his thesis by the use of language that is very far from ordinary. Those who are not familiar with the jargons of philosophy and sociology will find it hard to follow. Nevertheless, for me, the ...”

“... Iain MacIver shows his complicated personal involvement in the great storm in the Scottish Church, John Pinkerton discusses his place as a lawyer, and Karl Miller the evidence his preferences give for the changing literary taste of the day. Before the proliferation of central government departments and local administrative bureaucracies the judges in Scotland ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’ Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to ...”

“... Splendid​ specimens of the untrousered, strong-legged Celt’. That was what John Stuart Blackie, the founder of Scotland’s first chair of Celtic studies in 1882, liked to see about him in the Highlands. In Celts: Art and Identity (at the British Museum until 31 January, then at the National Museum of Scotland from 30 March until 25 September) he would have met several untrousered, strong-legged giants ...”