“... passing judgment on his characters with such solemn self-assurance, as from a Jacobean pulpit. It may be that the vengeful, conceited, ludicrous monologues of the appalling Croucher represent a form of self-parody. In our next three novels, all candidates for the bestseller list, the wacky, wonderful world of Washington DC and its heroic Press Corps is laid ...”

“... and the virtual defeat of most of the important bacterialdiseases.’ Whatever the general public may have thought about him, Florey stood unsurpassably high in the estimation of his colleagues – that which meansmost to a scientist – and in due course they elected him head of their profession in England as President of the Royal Society.It is fortunate ...”

“... between the Somme and Passchendaele, but Lawrence asked only that ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ Birkin enraged by ‘the disgrace of outspread London’ is not the same as his creator enraged by the disgrace of the Western Front. Lawrence’s point, of course, was that London and the Western Front were part of ...”

“... armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise. But we are not talking here about a cock-up with the vol-au-vents. We are talking about something on the lines of Belshazzar’s feast: but more lavish, and more ...”

“... ambition, really, as somebody like Mailer would define it. The yearned-for bays are withered; they may even turn out to be made of plastic – withered plastic, if this boy’s luck runs true to form. Larkin knew himself to be the champ – but he knew also that he was a small-time, local sort of champ. He was unlikely to make it in the heavyweight ...”

“... The prose here was wartime homesickness, commonplace as well as painful, but the poetry has what may now seem a slightly dated exactness and elegance, learned in part from Auden. Fuller was well known in the early Forties as a war poet, and there was a great demand for war poets. The experiences offered by the Navy were for the most part strictly ...”

“... or if it does, whether he is not asking himself if his instinctive personal reaction to a question may not be misguided or inadequate. Sometimes the message emerges from the dialogue itself, as the characters combine to build up a collective understanding of which each would have been incapable in isolation. None of this makes it possible to present Diderot as ...”

“... Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ... and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.’ Without comparing the two Thomsons, Leonard shows by quotation that the Victorian (1834-82) is the greater poet. He shows, too, that the later Thomson’s life reflects the state of Britain more fully ...”

“... based on fact’. As for Leonowens, by calling her second book The Romance of the Harem, she may well have meant to signal that the work was best not approached too literally. That her preface nonetheless insisted on the truthfulness of her tales should not necessarily cost her her novelist’s licence, since as Susan Morgan observes, ‘there is a long ...”

“... in the past). On historical precedent, Waterstone’s should win; but, like Barnes and Noble, it may lose the next battle. Smith’s and Waterstone’s are fighting a civil war, while the real enemy invades from cyberspace. Amazon.com began as a one-man operation in a garage three years ago. The garage-owning founder (now chief executive officer), Jeff (now ...”

“... a 12-year-old son and a sturdy little girl, also called Elizabeth, who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs ...”

“... language that is being forcibly altered to suit what is seen as a new form of knowledge. Hence we may be puzzled to hear of protagonists undergoing ‘textual breakdowns’ and ‘textual crises of identity’, often brought on by ‘transgressive semiotics’, a hazard normally, we are told, ‘gendered as female’. ‘The turning point from the imperial ...”

“... the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any of the lads from school put a hand up my skirt in the handball alley, but the anxiety persisted. Gabriel might show up at any moment and announce that the Holy ...”

“... She is annoyed when her individual circumstances are taken as proof of structural inequality. She may think of herself as an outsider to a certain kind of feminism, to the marketing of ‘self-care’, to the relentless insistence on empowerment, transformation, healing and sharing. The thought of posting online with a hashtag repels her. She ...”

“... seem unaffected, and that some species survive when exposed to industrial pollution, then one may feel that the future as well as the past may well belong to the ants.This group of insects can be described as a hundred-million-year success story. The ants and termites compose one-third of the biomass of the tropical ...”