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“... that this process may already be under way. Jonathan Raban’s Foreign Land and Black Marina by Emma Tennant are, from the formal standpoint, very different kinds of novel, but they share, quite strikingly, an un-English pre-occupation with the problem for the individual of belonging in the modern state. Jonathan Raban is a distinguished travel writer and ...”

“... who tried to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs. The many authors, for example, even Hardy himself, who increasingly denounced the paralysing effect upon literature and society of Mrs Grundyism – were they themselves being hypocritical, or just blind to their own best interests? Could they not see that the whole depth and suggestion of their ...”

“... had one son, killed in the British Army, and two daughters, Tom’s Aunt Clara and his mother, Emma. The flighty Emma had fallen for a member of the catering staff, while cruising on a passenger boat, and this long-lost man was Tom’s father. He was Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is ...”

“... more sympathetic. Bowen hadn’t read many short stories when she began to write her own: no ‘Hardy, Henry James, Maupassant or Katherine Mansfield’, Victoria Glendinning says in her 1977 biography: ‘she was not following any genre theoretically familiar to her.’ And for whatever reason, as she finds her way, it isn’t to drift Mansfield and Woolf ...”

“... as a hysteric and failing to wear a seat belt). With a better education, she might have liked Hardy and read Foucault with interest. ‘She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem,’ Diana said to 15 million people in the Panorama interview, slipping naturally into the third person. It was more like a trailer than a warning. Still, you wonder, is there ...”

“... two sentences under the heading ‘Provincial Policemen’. One might as well say that Laurel and Hardy were provincial comics. The growth of Andy Dalziel took place in metaphors of which Wodehouse would have been proud. At first only an ex-rugby player run to slabby fat, Dalziel began to burgeon in Ruling Passion (1973), after an antique dealer called ...”

“... than in the past. Another and more worrying case where second thoughts were called for is in ‘Hardy and the Ballads’, where Gunn discusses ‘During Wind and Rain’ in ignorance of Emma Hardy’s Some Recollections, published in 1961; 11 years later in Agenda it was acceptable for Gunn to acknowledge the ...”

“... and even more by Vivien Leigh in The Hamilton Woman, which begins with the elderly, raddled Emma looking into the camera as the picture dissolves and we see her young again ‘in all her beauty, running through the splendours of the palace in Naples’. It was thus, Strong recalls, that ‘history threw open its door to me.’ He never lost that sense ...”

“... of rewriting the classics so as to make them more ‘accessible’, adding a touch of cleavage to Emma Woodhouse or dash of zoophilia to Mr Knightley. Novels whose characters do not fall instantly to groping each other on first encounter are offensively elitist, out of touch with everyday experience. In postmodern eyes, sexuality is at its best when ...”

“... of the ‘social interpretation’ of the Revolution (enter the bourgeoisie, stage left) and a hardy band of ‘revisionists’ has left the crime scene more cluttered and confused than ever. On a deeper level, some of the more philosophically inclined in the profession have come to doubt conventional notions of causality altogether. In an influential ...”

“... features – the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of ...”

“... foot? It is a banal question, but the poem should be strong enough to meet all such questions.’ Hardy, who felt at least as strongly about the dead Emma as Yeats did about the live Maud, ‘would never shame himself by telling us’. Yeats, moreover, was a snob, and somehow this is related to his not being a ...”

“... conversations with tribesmen, or the way she scores off local bores or bullies, a sharp-tongued Emma speaking perfect Arabic, smacks more than a little of l’esprit d’escalier. But none of this matters: it is all part of Freya’s genius for projecting herself by creating a persona through which her journeys are experienced and her encounters with people ...”

“... object-choices – Ferenczi’s love life, with its mother-daughter triangle, is the plot of a Hardy novel – and he listened carefully to the raised temperatures around him, the fever for interpretation, licensing the new candour while keeping his counsel. His own practices flowed around his precepts: he made up rules, ignored the rules established in ...”

“... of our austere times, a totemic unfairness myth. Then, as one of the housing officers put it, Emma Dent Coad, the new MP for Kensington, ‘starts saying to the press “the council isn’t here,” and it was absurd.’ Council workers on the ground felt she was treating the whole thing as if it were a political game. They say they’d brought in ...”