“... boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware of always being obliged to say the unsayable, but the pose didn’t seem too strenuous to keep up. Anyway, it often wasn’t a pose, as I came to appreciate when we ...”

“... The Mortmere stories are of interest now chiefly as documents, although they do have some nice inspirations: the Rev Casimir Welken, for example, who breeds angels in his belfry. And it is easy enough to see why they made their adolescent readership sit up, As well as exhibiting a tense familiarity with the habits of the English upper-middle class ...”

“... have to come out after me some day, when you hear about the stars and the black people and all the nice things. I’m going to be quite well.’ By this time her younger brother Will was legal adviser to the Governor of Cape Colony, and she made a forceful entry into Cape politics. ‘There is one man I’ve heard of,’ she tells Havelock Ellis (April ...”

“... holed a putt at Walton Heath. ‘Sound man, Blennerhasset,’ they said on Throgmorton Street. ‘Nice people, the Blennerhassets,’ was the verdict over the teacups and in the local tennis clubs. But Yo-Yo got him ... and today he is happy in a quiet place in the country and under sympathetic surveillance he practises Yo-Yo tricks, having succumbed to the ...”

“... the Holy Ghost in flight; moreover, he has obliged their dog to fast during Lent. This latter is a nice stroke of humour, since all dogs in India live on the edge of starvation. The very idea of near-riots caused by the transplanting of the Oxford Movement to Indian soil is comic, as outraged Church of Englanders and trouble-seeking troopers on sick-leave ...”

“... the abuse-survivor, the Falklands veteran, has turned into an Immigration official with a nice eye for evidence: ‘There was a woman the other day – she was brought to an interview room. I found her badly disfigured, burnt, presumably.’ This horrible story (‘She claimed ... but how can you determine a torture victim?’) takes on more and more ...”

“... remains blank, with the super-title, ‘Permission to reproduce denied’. This happens in Richard Billingham’s case as well, although his pictures of his family escape Stallabrass’s everlasting fire. Concurrently with last year’s Turner Prize show at the Tate, Ana Maria Pacheco, a Brazilian artist long resident in this country, showed the works ...”

“... nuclear warheads. In principle, therefore, the whole nuclear arsenal could fit into one submarine. Richard Garwin, the designer of the first H-bomb, giving evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Defence in 2007, argued that a much smaller class of submarine, carrying missiles with a single warhead, would be more appropriate for the UK’s needs. There are ...”

“... thought remarkable. His best friend, A.C. Benson, declared that Monty’s ‘mind is the mind of a nice child – he hates and fears all problems, all speculation, all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous.’ James’s knowledge, he conceded, was ‘extraordinarily accurate and minute’ but mainly concerned with ...”

“... on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic puzzles: Elektra belongs to 1909, the same date as Schoenberg’s Erwartung, yet the more traditional Der Rosenkavalier followed in 1911. There ...”

“... It is concerned with ‘knowingness’. Few works are more indisputably travel writing than Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah (1855): every detail in his ‘pilgrimage’ – the attempt by an infidel Westerner to pass himself off as an Arab pilgrim and gain sight of the Muslim sacred places and ceremonies ...”

“... came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, J.K. Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of books on the ...”

“... supple, seductive little narratives full of heartwreck, depravity and shivering desolation? Nice try. The verdict was unanimous: he needed a novel. And here it is, a tome of his own: not the fifth book by a major writer of minor things but, as the cover flap has it (you can almost hear a sigh of relief issue from the colophon) the ‘highly anticipated ...”

“... modern world. I think of Edward’s London lectures on lateness, dazzling meditations on Adorno, Richard Strauss and Visconti. ‘It is as if,’ he said of these figures, ‘having achieved age they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability and official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded.’ In ...”

“... claim in the title. Small question marks apart, the Companion will redraw the literary map. Richard Altick’s latest book takes as its thesis the unfashionable view that novels reflect life. Professor Altick retired some time ago, and obviously relishes the freedom of not having to follow critical fashion. ‘After many years of criticism that has ...”