“... a religious genius, and hopes there will be more like him – for a mad moment one suspects he may have himself in mind for the part – but doesn’t want his own beliefs to be mistaken for any others that may be on offer. He is the sole modern expositor of a faith recovered from antiquity, and he urges all persons of ...”

“... he” ... Every he? Every man? What about the other 50 percent of the population?’ Here he may be anticipating the movement for children’s rights, as even the levellers were advocating only an adult franchise and adults comprised only about 55 per cent of the Early Modern population. As a result of his astounding productivity there has been much ...”

“... An exultant Cornwell described the Putnam deal as ‘the biggest ever for a woman’, which it may not be (Danielle Steel is more discreet about her advances). A list of the 25 all-time bestselling mystery titles drawn up by USA Today in March listed six Scarpetta titles, with The Body Farm (1994) at number one. In July 1996 Cause of Death was the ...”

“... in America, and his renown probably stems less from his poems, meritorious as the best of those may be, than from his political journalism and celebrated daredevilry, This indifference to contemporary English verse appears all the more ironic and quizzical in light of the determined attempts by numerous schools of American poetry to look beyond their own ...”

“... each by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath’. She would have liked her three subsequent novels ...”

“... at Edgbaston in the first test, when Ramadhin was required to bowl 98 successive overs while May and Cowdrey put on 411 for the fourth wicket. Sobers, who could bowl fast, reveals that he offered to try taking the long overdue new ball, but Goddard would not take this risk! Ramadhin himself was demoralised and took only five further wickets in the ...”

“... is Barthelme’s stories. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (an early effort which the author may now find embarrassingly obvious), the leader of the protest against the human condition ended up by delivering a lecture ‘with good diction and enunciation’ to a tiny audience. The lecturer had eloquence, and eloquence, he said, is ‘really all any of us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... say, ten thousand years, too short a time for any transitional stages to show up as fossils – may stay the same for five to ten million years after that. The process by which a new species is formed is apparently too fast to show up in the fossil record, but too slow to be observed in human experience. ‘No utterly convincing case of true speciation ...”

“... cannot be entirely due to the fact that the longest of them is an address to the Press Club. It may seem extraordinary that the most solid sections of this volume are devoted, not to the rarified intellectual concerns among which the author moves so easily, but to matters of family history – certainly, in the case of such a family, of more than private ...”

“... even trouble to make a list and puts forward no claim to theoretical completeness. The boundaries may vary and the list may be extended. He reproves me for having called the theory of genres a classification, and I take his point. Fowler sees the literary kinds rightly, not simply as a system of labels deduced post facto ...”

“... its deeper meaning – just what Freud predicted would happen in the United States.’ Bettelheim may well have earned an attitude of self-assurance, but it is astonishing how he turns a subtle and difficult issue into one that is unambiguously straightforward. No less a historian of ancient culture than Jean-Pierre Vernant has written that ‘there is no ...”

“... his natural medium. ‘I do not think that people want love most,’ he writes in his Journal (12 May 1946): ‘they need the settled reveries, the calm testing and tasting of their past and the world’s past ... I am talking about “people” when I mean “me”.’ It surprised Welch very much when he found himself sharing a successful ménage with the ...”

“... with another over a period of many years, is in fact unlikely to be repeated here. A better guide may well be Canada, which has experienced no fewer than six minority governments since 1957 and, be it noted, is none the worse for that. What will probably happen when next the Conservative and Labour Parties both fail to win a majority is that the larger will ...”

“... Productive. Efficient member of the workforce.’ Productive and efficient the steel-driving hero may be. Articulate narrator he is not. His solidity makes a point about Solidarity. His humble reflections on the upheaval around him may even be eloquent in his native Polish. But working-class vernacular must vie with poetry ...”