“... belletristic waffling on the grounds that he was modestly self-deprecating. He had indeed much to be self-deprecating about. Astonishingly, Taylor even manages to imply that Quiller-Couch’s genteel brand of literary appreciation was in some ways preferable to the critical rigour of the Leavisites. He has a good word to say about ...”

“... preservation of native cultures as long as they fitted his theories of what native cultures should be. In the North, the missionaries and their Western education were discouraged, to prevent what Lugard called their ‘corrupting influence’ on Islamic schools. Western education thrived in the South. The regions had different interests, saw each other as ...”

“... A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide (‘I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her’). When he wakes up he vomits on the corpse, a reflex of horror and remorse that amounts to a further assault ...”

“... texts, and is consequently able to avenge his father and restore the family fortunes. It would be good to feel that one’s own dusty cogitations might have some such tangible, uplifting result. But there isn’t much hope. For the modern scholar, the consolation is a good score in the latest research assessment, some nice trips at someone else’s ...”

“... talentless hacks:   Who best can send on high The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes. As Kathryn King observes in the first full-length biography of Haywood for almost a hundred years, these lines are straight out of ‘the well-stocked cabinet of misogynistic satiric ...”

“... for a huge splenetic autobiography, denigrating everyone I’ve ever known: it would have to be left to the nation in large brass-bound boxes, to be printed when all of us are dead.’ In the event he arranged to have his diaries shredded a few days before his death in 1985. But there was enough spleen and denigration ...”

“... with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women defying his authority, but he was bored by women who were easily controlled. These conflicts are central to his fiction. If his thinking on questions of gender had been less tangled, he would have been a different and less absorbing writer. It doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that he could treat ...”

“... Stalin in particular, was unshakeable. Purges and famines, executions and persecutions passed him by. Though he never saw the need actually to join the Party, he remained a tankie to the last, until he was finally winkled out of the deanery in 1963, when he was pushing ninety. The only occasion in his whole life when he admitted to experiencing doubt was ...”

“... more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put ...”

“... Julian Bell has written a tremendous history of world art, one that will inevitably be compared with Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published nearly sixty years ago. Since then image-making technologies that seemed mature have changed and expanded their reach. In 1950 we lived in an image flood. We are now, as Bell puts it, in an image jam ...”

“... incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it. It ran from 1812 to 1815; the peace that formally settled it was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but because news took so long to travel not everyone knew this until April the following year. It was during this war that British troops burned down ...”

“... Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently ...”

“... had a hit show to publicise before). The first series ran on BBC4 in March; the second series will be broadcast next year. Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the ...”

“... according to his first-rate biographer, Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or ...”

“... At the end of last year, when the commission appointed by Jacques Chirac to look into the health of secular values in France delivered its recommendations, no one was surprised to hear that a ban on the wearing of all ostentatious religious symbols in schools, the Muslim hijab or veil above all, was high on the list ...”