“... Imperial University, Infectious Disease Research Laboratory, Tokyo etc’ Extraordinary though it may seem, the activities of Unit 731 (and related outfits) were virtually unknown to most Japanese at least until 1976, when a Japanese television documentary was made on the subject. And the cat was only truly let out of the bag in 1982, with the publication of ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... both been contested in recent times. First came a challenge to the notion of portrayal. Viewers may delight in the depiction of people and objects, but, so a new interpretation went, we were really meant to attend to the moral instruction offered. What you see is not what you ought to get. Is Dutch culture and its art a balancing act: the bountiful returns ...”

“... for the family firm, fundamentally different characters. The wonder, however, is not that ‘David’ should have turned out badly but that ‘Bertie’ should have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different ...”

“... into the nether regions is frequently heroic and, in achieving it, he is ennobled but emasculated. David Goodis is the laureate of this mood. William Kennedy, a more recent mythologist of hobo as artist, has seen his novel Ironweed make it all the way to the screen, where Jack Nicholson was obliged to continue his career-long impersonation of the damaged but ...”

“... it leaves one issue open, as does the rest of the Dayton Agreement. So wide open, in fact, that it may swallow up all the remaining good intentions contained in the deal. Nowhere is it established who will be responsible for the security or armed forces of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its two entities – nowhere, that is, except in the second part of the Military ...”

“... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...”

“... think there is a disposition among all classes not to bear with the troubles that may arise in their own houses. If a person is troublesome from senile dementia, dirty in his habits, they will not bear with it now. Persons are more easily removed to an asylum than they were a few years ago.’ In our own day official thinking has come full ...”

“... Barbra Streisand, helped craft this letter, though schlock sincerity is a tennis staple. Agassi may have felt betrayed, but he wasn’t actually paying Bollettieri much. Similarly, when Bollettieri called Agassi into his office at the academy for persistently flouting rules, defying discipline and being threatened with expulsion from a local private school ...”

“... showed a keen eye for the blackish tales of restless lives, lives that fall short despite a devil-may-care audacity. In ‘Pickpocket’, Chop-a-Leg, who has been deaf to medical advice (‘I had diabetes 12 years and wouldn’t quit smokin’), puts his faith in porridge to lower his cholesterol level: ‘I like looking at the Pilgrim on the box. What a ...”

“... for the Black Panthers. ‘Radical Chic’ has passed so far into the Anglo-American argot that it may be futile, 13 years later, to attempt to expose it. For one thing, it was so nearly right. Everybody knew somebody who answered or fitted the description. For another, the older and cleverer phrase – limousine liberal – had gone out with Adlai Stevenson ...”

“... it is the consequence of a belief – the belief that as well as the mind there is the soul, which may know and feel things the mind cannot grasp, except perhaps by fragmentary translations into words which are not the words we use every day. It is not a belief that is often exemplified in modern fiction. In saying this, we run into the danger of making ...”

“... to the best in poetry. In all the arts, there are broad movements which are inexorable. You may choose to swim against the tide, and perhaps do it very well, but you can’t turn it back; and English poets for half a century have mostly chosen to swim against what my hunch as a literary historian tells me will prove to have been the major tide of poetry ...”

“... hand, it is quietly and consistently funny, and so full of Powell’s characteristic note that it may help us to see what that note is. Let’s start with what seems to be a difficulty. The book is written in a blurred prose which is the stylistic equivalent of talking with marbles in your mouth. He early expressed the conviction, a tenable one, that he ...”

“... Auster: his ex-wife is Delia (Auster’s Lydia), his present Iris (Auster’s Siri); his son is David (Auster’s Daniel), his daughter Sonia (Auster’s Sophie). Even the dates seem to correspond. At the front, indeed, ‘the author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction’. This teasing game plays dangerously on ...”