“... to ‘Becky has a mischievous twinkle in her eye; what next?’ Liberties have been taken. It may be that I am doing D.J. Taylor an injustice. He may have found some source material hitherto unused by biographers which contradicts Thackeray’s description of the event. But if so, we would never know. His notes are even ...”

“... where Lakatos has moved centre stage. Readers who like gossip will not be disappointed. The staid may be appalled by the ribald tone of this little bit of Mitteleuropa am Aldwych. Two items in the book will be new to almost everyone. Both concern Lakatos. The first, which is already being talked about (I heard several corrupt versions before reading the ...”

“... language Nietzsche uses to characterise the discourse of the Apollonian and Dionysian may have had a seductive power for Rothko: “illusion”, “hallucinations”, “dream”, “veils”, “mirror”, “reflections”, “essence and appearance”, “the sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art”’. This is literary talk, not ...”

“... to and including Monsignor Quixote (1982). As the jacket declares, Saints, Sinners and Comedians may also prove ‘invaluable, especially with its concise plot descriptions, to students’ – freeing them from the task of actually reading whatever books by Greene have been assigned in their courses. At least in the United States, Greene’s name rarely ...”

“... been questioned, a fact that has changed the way in which the traditional problem is viewed, so it may be (as Mark Twain’s sour tone suggests) that taking our self-respect for granted is a vain prejudice too, and that the only answer to the problem of human evil is that it has no answer: that we are just a revoltingly evil species. But even if that is ...”

“... told in The Borrowers), being ‘nearly two feet high, would seem a giant to a Borrower’: this may refer to some real-life dwarf to whom the name was attached, like the famous Charles Stratton, ‘General Tom Thumb’, for the Tom Thumb of early ballad or folk-tradition was sometimes literally ‘but an inch in height’. It’s essential for little people ...”

“... the implications of his decision are interesting. The grand question ‘what is art for?’ may elicit less revealing answers than the simple one: ‘where shall we put it?’ It was not just the scale and seriousness of Rothko’s paintings that made the restaurant an unsuitable place to hang them, for when a real chapel was built in Texas for another ...”

“... version, we go from a first stage when you must screw your cousins, to a second stage when you may not do so, and on to a final free-for-all when you do everybody. The present volume makes another major contribution to an overall theoretical issue in the discipline. There is a piquancy about this subject-matter of food. An outsider, at any rate if of ...”

“... Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named Ermes Marana, whose purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army ...”

“... what we wanted them to express.’ This will remind many people (and not just correct speakers, it may be suggested) of a verbal experience which they have had – but only to the extent that pornography reminds us of sex. Using language well is never quite as good as this. Correct usage does not necessarily lead to satisfactory meaning, as Mr Simon’s own ...”

“... they are, with protests and complaints, converted into publicity. It’s something the media may have learnt from the old stockyards, in which none of the pig was wasted. My intention in this book was to be hard, to abandon rhetorical flourishes and keep myself to direct statement. I don’t think I’ve ever written a book with so many simple ...”

“... his penultimate chapter that he had occasionally got his chronology wrong)? And whatever view one may take on this, the vein of brutality and grotesquerie in Far Away and Long Ago becomes additionally fascinating in the light of Hudson’s anecdote. Whether he saw into his past, or only into his own nature, on that second day of illness, the reader is alerted ...”

“... the novelist will have to withdraw? I do not think so: love and crime have more in common than may appear at first sight. Love is one of the revolutionary forces of modern times: in its intense and individualistic form, it has increasingly subverted the preoccupation with prestige and property that once governed marriage and, indeed, society as a whole. It ...”

“... give of her life – as they dominate her writing. Their circumstances and their resourcefulness may vary a little, but almost all Jean Rhys’s heroines, both in her novels and in her short stories, suffer from a similar incapacity to wake up from a dream. They know this about themselves, but the world seems to them too harsh and they lack the ‘nous’ to ...”

“... is no avoiding the fact that he battened on the great unblushingly. To modern readers this may seem degrading and regrettable.’ Carey, worldly and wise, knows better. But the rhetorical sleight is there in ‘to modern readers’, as if it would be an anachronism to attribute to Donne’s contemporaries any principled censure of those who batten on ...”