“... other two novelists under review are more blatant in this respect, since both Michèle Roberts and David Grossman have written novels which pivot on the sentimental privileging of authorship. ‘I want to tell you my stories. I want to record my life with you. I want to give myself a history,’ insists one of Roberts’s narrators, a contemporary writer ...”

“... The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the ...”

“... it looks as if the electorate has abandoned them too – hence his dumping of the Tories in 1997. David McKnight sees all this differently. Murdoch knew that he could have no influence in China. There was no point in alienating its government and damaging his profits, so he ditched the promotion of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch ...”

“... writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a portrait of amour fou and its aftermath in ...”

“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... the guiding thoughts of the book is how ridiculous the story makes the Klan look. Time spent with David Duke ‘really feels comical’. ‘We had been making fools out of the Klan all these months.’ How does the man do the infiltrating? In whiteface? Is he a very pale policeman, adept at passing? These are the wrong questions, as it happens, although ...”

“... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... more clothing and paid more attention to fashion. Canny silk producers drove this development by means of advertising and what amounted to market research: monitoring consumer taste and putting out brightly coloured new patterns each year. Demand drove up prices – and profits – allowing producers to take even more risks. Sewell, in Marxian ...”

“... a substantially different novel. But the novel we now have, the novel we have always had, is by no means easy to interpret or even to describe. In D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World, Kinkead-Weekes suggests a reading against the grain when he points out that The Rainbow could be described as a historical novel: a novel concerned, not with the travails of the ...”

“... so well (partly, perhaps, because of his own obsessive motivicism and thematicism), he was by no means insensitive to the orchestra, even though his first instrument was plainly the piano; the lessons learnt from Stravinsky and Copland play their part, but except for certain concertante-piano textures there is no Bernstein ‘sound’ apart from that ...”

“... lower-middle-class provincial boy with commonplace social aspirations, but with very uncommonplace means of fulfilling them: as he made music, so music made him. True. But the implications of this go largely unexplored. By conquering the oratorio, the symphony and the concerto, Elgar also conquered the court, the country and the Establishment. Music was the ...”

“... In other words they learn from their mistakes, without stopping to wonder what it really means to learn or to make a mistake. It is amazing how much can be accomplished by machines that operate like this. It’s as though they were just waiting to be told that they should try doing it their way, not ours. The prince of this brave new world – and ...”

“... observed. ‘Well, he’s left school, hasn’t he?’ demanded my father. ‘ “School-leaver” means some no-hope fifteen-year-old from a secondary modern,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a euphemism.’ She was a well-educated woman, my mother. ‘Pays like a euphemism, too,’ she added. Years of marriage to my father had imparted a Yiddish edge to her ...”