“... 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 ...”

“... supported by Futility, does not seem a strong enough base on which to rebuild a reputation. It may even reinforce the old view that Gerhardie was no more than a quite interesting and rather peculiar kind of failure. In fact, everybody interested in good novels should read him. I speak as a new convert, for although I read Futility forty years ago I knew ...”

“... it by wit’. Stevie Smith’s poems are full of transformations and translations: a frog may become a prince, a typist gets sucked into the seascape of a Turner canvas in her lunch-hour. But what gives her verse its distinctive ring is her way of putting together the humdrum and the elevated in situation and vocabulary. In her poems large events ...”

“... Mottahedeh is not an apologist for the revolution. He recognises that this portrait of a mullah may satisfy neither its opponents nor its supporters. Some Iranians will feel that the account of the mullah who stands at the centre of this book’s personal narrative is not reverential enough; he has experienced doubts and shifts of attitude that they will ...”

“... persons so qualified, had not dragged poor Sir Thomas into light and ridicule.’ Walpole may shape events too readily in terms of antithesis (as of the reverse at Fort Duquesne in 1755, when General Braddock, ‘finding his generalship exerted too late, pushed his valour to desperation’). More often, the feline wit serves purposes of acute ...”

“... through extracts from diaries, from correspondence and from the two rival newspapers. Poe may seem out of place in the list of predecessors. The Lin Tin Bulletin hails his edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as an enthralling factual account, which earns the paper the ridicule of the Monitor: a reminder that we are on treacherous ground. An ...”

“... true to his promise that he would move there in October 1883 ‘in whatever condition the premises may be’. One party of casual passers-by, seeing workmen and open doors, took a look inside and were surprised to find Gilbert in residence. Contemporary photographs show dark, elaborate interiors in which dramatist and architect (Harold Peto took 7 Collingham ...”

“... of providing a future for their children. Of course my grandmother’s story and my research may not really contradict one another. Flatt may have first defended the acquisition of land, and later thought it was becoming excessive. But at least my anecdote demonstrates something relevant to Witi Ihimaera’s ...”

“... Schools of Social Science none of whose members believe in or practise functionalism. They may be wrong. If so, then someone must either do a better job on the formal logic of functionalist explanation, or else argue that it is not a type of discussion that lends itself to formalisation. The rest of Douglas’s book suggests the latter alternative. The ...”