“... writing about it and making it public. At one level, Gordimer’s work over the last three decades may be read as the representative political chronicle of the society in which she lives. The chronicle is deepened and made personal not only by the portrayal of individuals and the entering of other people’s minds, but by a recurrent concern with ...”

“... pity when the story is so briskly anecdotal. However, the book has a fine, strange beginning which may be enough to make you decide to get it into your hands immediately: How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill ...”

“... periodic revolts in Upper Egypt. Finally the Romans take over and whip everyone back into line. It may be that this overview is broadly correct, but it is only just beginning to be put to the test. And the test comes from study of other documents, preferably archives, of different date and provenance from the Zenon archive, and including Egyptian texts, all ...”

“... his life, obediently reinforcing the English stereotype of the feckless Mick. Of course Heathcliff may not be Irish at all. He may be a gypsy, or a lascar, or (like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) a creole. It is hard to know how black he is, or rather how much of the blackness is grime and bile and how much pigmentation. As for ...”

“... is a Common Cause beyond the Borders. Even after some reverses in the General Election and in the May local elections, Labour is still the dominant party in Scotland (though with a support comparable to that enjoyed by the Tories in Ukania). The message of the General Election was an ambiguous one for Labour. It enforces the tactic of calling (yet again) for ...”

“... of pain and loss of self can represent the almost intolerable shamanic journey from which you may emerge a poet, like Taliesin, or a healer, like Vikram.‘Anancy and the Hideaway Garden’ (James Berry’s excellent rendering), gives us the opposite scenario. Old Witch-Sister has a beautiful garden which Anancy Spider-man wants to enjoy. ‘Look at ...”

“... mediated’, in Conrad’s phrase, and patches of its careful prose feel as if they may have been polished once or twice too often, as in ‘there were larks and plovers over the fields, and the tall blue days seemed amazed by their own candour,’ or ‘there was ... an impenetrable thoughtfulness hanging on the air like scent.’ Edward ...”

“... are distinct Japanese characteristics (such as indirectness) in Ishiguro’s work, however much he may disclaim them. But the choice of a loyal elderly senior servant as his English narrator has meant that Ishiguro can use indirectness, obliquity, and indeed the troubling pressures of obligation and indebtedness, in a way that is clearly congenial to him, and ...”

“... and reinforced. Those partial to the conspiracy theory of the sinking island of English letters may take comfort from the fact that the selection of poems in Essential Reading (1986) is edited by Alan Jenkins of the TLS. And that book contains a few examples of what are (in part at least) knowing winks: after describing a catalogue of sufferings in ...”

“... in the poem ‘producing the illusion that is was written specially for me, however well I may know that it was written for the whole nation, or for no one in particular’. The voice with personality, and for that reason with authority, determined ‘this collection of my favourite poems’. It is an incisive principle and pays off well: it makes a ...”

“... Federal Germans are giving to those ‘from over there’ is warm and generous. Lubeck and Hamburg may have said, ‘Enough is enough,’ but even the mafiosi Bavarians, with their traditional hatred of everything Prussian and Protestant, for whom ‘socialism’ and ‘atheism’ are synonyms, got schools, town halls and Ratskeller ready to receive the masses ...”

“... to overcome them – although they are also that. The papers show, as much as they discuss, what may be involved in the idea of the responsibilities of intellectuals. The papers by Eastern and Western writers are very different in tone and concern – and who would be surprised? Most of the Eastern European writers take for granted that intellectuals have ...”

“... approaches, bows unsteadily, and declares with exaggerated gallantry: ‘Oh beautiful lady in red, may I have this waltz?’ The person thus addressed replies: ‘No, Mr Brown, and for three reasons. First, you are too drunk to dance. Secondly, this is not a waltz but the Brazilian national anthem. And thirdly, I am not a beautiful lady in red but the Papal ...”

“... the ‘progress’, which were sometimes described as comic history painting, and which may have contained the implication that the commercial England of the mid-18th century was not a place in which ideal history painting in the Italian manner could flourish – and that this was a cause for congratulation, not regret. What the English needed was ...”

“... instalments will be complete this summer, has reportedly clocked up almost a hundred sales. That may not seem a lot, until you multiply it by the unit price of £30,000 (£5000 cheaper if you got in early). Chadwyck-Healey is a commercial publisher and the sales figures are now well past break-even into substantial profit. More important, enough databases ...”