“... pass a bonfire of rags and oil in the village and suddenly, in an overwhelming moment, I was in a field in Normandy and the next tank, with my friends in it, was burning and about to explode. I think I then understood the professional culture of distance. Its antiseptic presentation of the images of war was skilled but childish. This sense was deepened by the ...”

“... arguments finally break out and break down. BS501 (and PS501 too) await their textbook writers. Frank Kermode’s masterguides are not such men. As Leach, for instance, explains, he is not offering stock answers to any stock questions. Indeed, he warns, anyone who read him for this would be put down by most examiners as ...”

“... to become residuals (and hence very difficult to relate to anything real). Solow and Temin are frank: ‘The usual routine, in the absence of anything better, is to treat technology as the ultimate residual ... This is particularly unsatisfying to the historian.’ So it is that many historians, while finding the national income aggregative approach ...”

“... up. The Quarry also shares a number of similarities with The Wasp Factory: like the psychopathic Frank in The Wasp Factory, The Quarry’s narrator, Kit, is a troubled teen stuck in a house with strange and unpredictable adults. What, the novel seems to be asking, is normal adult behaviour? What is innocence? What is youth? How shall we then live? In both ...”

“... because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth. ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start. The letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies who wanted to ...”

“... are given equal prominence.UbuWeb is a compendious resource of everything from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa, but has no systematic collection policy, being steered only by the instincts, enthusiasms and seemingly boundless energy of Goldsmith, a poet and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, who founded it in 1996 (he is also a senior editor at the ...”

“... and ready to make a new conquest, just as it is an extraordinarily adept configuration of the field for those who may come to the subject weary from old failures to understand, or convinced that it is either marginal or obscure. What is strikingly original is that the five expositors, each of them a well-known expert in his ...”

“... of whinstone and ponds of dark, still water. By the 1950s the only farmland left was a potato field and a stretch of grazing that supported two Clydesdale horses we knew as Clyde and Prince. Most of the rest of this small area – those bits not occupied by houses, quarries, roads and railway tracks – was owned by the War Office, which had appreciated ...”

“... is Hartfield, her village Highbury, and the very names suggest ideality: not much can spoil the field of the heart or touch the high citadel. A moral dimension, often taken to be the story of the novel, satisfactorily deepens this supremely pleasure-giving affair, sometimes called the happiest of all Jane Austen’s pastorals. Emma, like a Maeterlinck ...”

“... instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears ...”

“... difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be the play of the child’s confused and obscure notation of it.’ Maisie cannot be expected to possess a full understanding of the doings of her divorced parents (‘the ...”

“... education; we are introduced to computerised ‘content analysis’ of Darwin’s language by Frank Sulloway; James Secord marks out another new direction with his article on Darwin’s contacts among the animal breeders. Others provide assessments of current work: on the psychology of Darwin’s creativity, on his path to Malthusian selection, and so ...”

“... whether respecting himself or others. In his own case he has to cope with his biographer Andrew Field, his commerce with whom deteriorates swiftly and with cause, from the co-operative to the adversarial, to the point where, by 1973, Nabokov is telling one of his Russian correspondents: ‘His version of my life has turned out to be cretinous. I have had to ...”

“... is about. The salvationist strand to design on the Underground is nothing new. It goes back to Frank Pick, the Yorkshire puritan and businessman who imposed modern aesthetics and a measure of uniformity on the maze of private lines brought together in 1933 as London Transport. Pick also did a great deal of straightforward management, but his name is always ...”

“... that then ruled the Arsenal changing rooms. Adams’s treatment of Bergkamp is nothing if not frank. His first serious reference to him is to note that he refused Adams’s offer of help with his fear of flying (a fear Adams shared) – ‘it didn’t seem like he wanted any help at that time.’ His second is to report the telling of home ...”