“... peculiar and transient difficulties of one offshore island at an awkward corner in its history. It may be time for another spin of the wheel in the 1980s, with the revival of doctrines of sound money and good housekeeping under Reagan and Thatcher. Now Keynes has admittedly not been getting any younger in the meantime, so the hypothetical views upon economic ...”

“... scene. ‘There are hundreds of objects here for which there are no words in Yiddish. They may not even have names in English. All life in America keeps constantly changing. How can such a nation create a real literature?’ Isaac must have agreed at least up to a point with this defeatist view. Although only just 30, he chose to stick to Yiddish as ...”

“... flaws of the individuals in the case. It maintains that since everyone has prejudices, the dangers may be mitigated only by changing the person from time to time’, every few years; he can, but need not, come from inside the BBC or indeed this country. When, prior to Glock’s takeover, the Proms were ruled by a committee, any fairness, balance, was bought at ...”

“... the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account ...”

“... at last, however, the faith which moves mountains has moved even a publisher, and, whatever one may think of the edition, everybody who has any sort of justice and kindness in his heart must rejoice at the courage of the University of Chicago Press, who have taken this half-century’s enterprise under their wing, as well as at the courage of Miss Byrne who ...”

“... Rowan.’ (Rowan was an 18th-century patriot.) With this sentence out guide is in difficulties. We may allow a child and an old lady to give pet-names to two brushes. It is another thing to be told that ‘as he grows older’ he ‘meditates’ on actual historical events. We become sceptical. A novel is not a biography. Dedalus is not Joyce. We ask ourselves ...”

“... is mushy at best, resting, not on respect, but on a caprice that might be withdrawn, and which may even imply the fascist notion that the lives of animals are somehow forfeit to humans but can be redeemed by an act of clemency or leniency on the part of the boss species. His very terminology does violence to the pro-animal arguments of such Victorians as ...”

“... it ‘easier for the dominators and predators who prosper in a Hobbesian or Sadean world’, one may agree that all these things are as bad as he says, while questioning whether they’re any worse than the intellectual atmosphere revealed by his own bludgeoning style and the vulgar facility of his mental transitions. I wonder, too, whether the connection ...”

“... in words as the means, the lovely apparatus, of revelation. One of these, ‘Gooseberry Fool’, may surprise English readers by the fuss the poet kicks up over her discovery of the unexotic fruit, which she ends by promising to incorporate in the dish of the title, but only after having already made a verbal meal of it. Lines like bristling up through ...”

“... Labour Party’s ability to transplant its professed anti-colonialism from opposition to office may note that the Colonial Secretary who signed the Land Apportionment Act was the noted Fabian, Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, who soon thereafter set out with Beatrice to admire the USSR; while the worst uprooting of Rhodesia’s black peasantry (as well as the ...”

“... is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old ...”

“... work. In a long, dedicatory preface he states that his expressed confidence in his own translation may appear arrogant: ‘yet is intended for the honour of my country.’ He attacks the ‘affected purity’ of the French language and asserts that the self-conscious perfectionism of French writers has ‘unsinewed’ their heroic verse. Virgil identifies ...”

“... By being ornamental in this sense they were able to be meaningful in others which Michelangelo may not have been fully conscious of and which are hard to put into words. There is no discussion here of the respectable channels provided in the Renaissance for the sublimation of homosexuality, nor of the metaphors then available with which a celibate might ...”

“... Anywhere but here lies in its presentation of Adele, the heroine’s mother. Every American woman may have her own story, but all children who read can use the myth of a mother both vital and wrong. As with her use of the movement to the West, one feels that Mona Simpson’s drawing of Adele, her giving her lines like ‘I’m part of all that went before and ...”

“... props are more common and more affecting, chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands ...”