“... around to it. Something about the title kept putting me off: that cosy French chez followed by a harsher, doubly foreign surname. But I must have started it once, because there was a boarding-card stub stuck in at the end of the first chapter. So, twenty years on, it was time finally to follow Anita’s advice. That harsh, clashing title turns out to ...”

“... novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the area had become known as the East Village, and the building had come down in the world. After a fire it was refurbished and turned into a condominium, in which Steven Traum, an ...”

“... well as considering aspects of history, sociology and political theory. Robinson’s reluctance to be classified hasn’t always worked in his favour. When Black Marxism was first published by Zed Press in London in 1983 it was met with silence from academics. It didn’t sell well and soon went out of print, but second-hand ...”

“... of the Language, published ten years on from the first, contains 53 essays and nine poems, each by a different author. The dust-jackets of both editions are almost wholly taken up, front and back, with a well-spaced parade of contributing writers’ names, and this provides a visual counterpart to something that emerges very clearly from the essays ...”

“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...”

“... In England, where the opposite can easily seem to be the case, there is always someone around to say that the visual arts matter. Not just that they are life-enhancing or give pleasure, but that they are a test of the health of a society. Bad art means bad lives are being lived. Good policies will be known by the art they encourage ...”

“... bellowed about like a great calf. But it’s not long before we discover that the Fullers could be as sharp over money as Will Piper. Next June Joseph Fuller was entrusted by Turner with the task of beating down a man who wanted nine guineas for a horse, but Joseph bought the animal himself, and barefacedly informed ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 ...”

“... a city-wide security cordon to reach his target. The Finest was chosen because it was frequented by foreigners who wouldn’t be in Kabul were it not for the occupation, and because, exceptionally for such a place, it was not protected by security guards or reinforced doors. It was not ...”

“... for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent offensive looked somewhat different when viewed at longer range. The same Buckley who swooned over McCarthy was already defending Truman’s record in the 1960s. The same Buckley who wrote hymns to racial segregation in the 1950s ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... the three. They were tall, fair-haired, attractive, yet had physical flaws (Wood was crippled by polio, Hillary was disfigured by appalling burns received during the Battle of Britain, Wolfenden developed eye trouble during National Service). They came from provincial middle-class homes, their mothers beloved and ...”

“... memoir cannot have helped, though she had meant it to ‘correct’ the view of her mother given by her sister. For one thing, it was suggested she write it after she’d impressed the audience at a PEN club memorial with her description of how moody her mother was and how frightened she had been of her. And isn’t there something fishy about the title ...”

“... In the great quilted cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties ...”

“... to find some way of coming to terms with such a rich and extensive body of work, all of it marked by Berger’s unflagging seriousness, his insistence on somehow merging personal response, social insight, aesthetic theory and political commentary. Every piece is rigorously thought through but also heartfelt, sometimes almost embarrassingly so.Berger’s ...”