“... fragment’, as another character observes) is this rich and dense account of a life rendered. As John Bainbridge sifts through his rag-bag of memories, we close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an ...”

“... to perfecting the process of political competition and representation – see, for example, John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust. Judicial activism in the interest of protecting substantive rights not required (or previously decided) by the political process itself would, on this view, be undemocratic. It would be undemocratic because it would ...”

“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... her earlier life. He knows her handsome brother Jeremy, currently up at Magdalen. His best friend, John ‘Pimlico’ Price, a manufacturer of sweets, is an acquaintance of her former lover, Geoffrey. Theo seems to go out of his way to throw Evelyn and Price together. It emerges that Jeremy is bisexual, and has been Price’s lover. Evelyn herself, in freakish ...”

“... metal than Gilbert. His Perseus, Icarus and Eros, and the works by Pomeroy, Frampton or Goscombe John of a similar character, are exercises in the precarious balance, slender support, open pose, complex silhouette and brittle projection which are either impossible to achieve, or ineffective if achieved, in stone. What of the narrative element in sculpture ...”

“... attractive, formidable people in Nigerian writing (and indeed in tales by Rider Haggard and John Buchan), but books from white-settler territory, by such authors as Athol Fugard or J.M. Coetzee, seem to present them as permanently morose, deformed in body and soul, to be pitied from a great height. I exaggerate, but Donald Bloch’s morbid novel ...”

“... publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or their daring escapes meant nothing: ‘these people’, wrote Amalie Struve from ‘the gloomy banks of the Thames’, ‘do not know our ...”

“... inventive faculty is always glad of a reality-principle, no matter how earthy or matter-of-fact. (John Ashbery’s poem, ‘My Erotic Double’, is an interesting variant of this theme.) The Death of the Body ends with a telegram informing Uta of the fate of two of the characters – and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of ...”

“... One of the most revealing sentences in God’s Instruments comes in the penultimate essay on ‘John Milton: Life and Writing’, where Worden suggests that ‘among the main themes of Milton’s writing before 1649, one subject is conspicuous by its absence: politics.’ This of a man who, over the previous decade, had written in support of the freedom of ...”

“... world’. There was, it seems, no other way to imagine this desire to carry on against all odds. John Buchan stage-managed Howard-Bury’s 15 reports for the Times from the 1921 expedition and made them as popular ‘as a serial novel by Dickens’. Mallory and others returned to undertake a gruelling series of public lectures, all of which were supposed to ...”

“... put it: ‘We’ve given all you people need to know.’ Even Republicans don’t like Mitt. (John McCain thought the inimitable Sarah Palin a better choice as his running mate.) At the convention, it was astonishing how many speakers barely mentioned the presidential candidate at all. In the end, there was almost nothing for a good Republican to say. His ...”

“... its texture, its clichés. Over the years Amis has done a lot of virtuous wincing over clichés. John Fowles is a prominent target: ‘He managed a wan smile’; ‘God, you’re so naive.’ No expensive talk about Descartes, Marivaux, Lemprière and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for ...”

“... crime prevention. Various interested parties – including Egan, the saxophonist Max Raymond and John Roman, a Vietnam veteran who is also the only black character in the book – eventually decide to take action against Mortimer, but their plans seem worryingly ineffectual. Nor are these the only goings-on around Eagle Lake: indeed, Mortimer’s reign of ...”

“... the 1930s. No doubt he was moved by the hunger marches, certainly he was stirred by the death of John Cornford, appalled by Fascism, and disturbed by the plight of Jewish scholars, but what remains clear from her account is that Blunt took little serious interest in politics and had very little knowledge of, or exposure to, the unemployed or oppressed – or ...”

“... in fidelity to men gone to battle. Yet this origin is mythical, put in circulation by the 1949 John Ford film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which starred John Wayne as a cavalry officer in the Indian battles in the West. And even this source is shaky: as used today, the ribbons date only to the ‘hostage crisis’ of ...”