“... in Love to have been a soft-focus, rural idyll, and I fall to imagining a red sun rising behind a field of gently rippling Bohemian corn, and, beyond it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning seductively. ‘Good morning, Sales Ledger, this is Martine, how may I help you?’ I have been put through.Phone-hold music is a late, trivial but characteristic effect of the ...”

“... allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the implication that ...”

“... respectability he volunteers for Vietnam, where he serves his 365 days as a private in a field transport unit. The bulk of Buffalo Afternoon deals with the war. And it is clear that the veterans to whom Schaeffer listened did not mince their words. The novel contains hideous and wholly convincing battle descriptions. We learn the effect of white ...”

“... ignored the linkage between beliefs about sex and sexual practices. As a result, ‘he leaves the field of bodies and pleasures perfectly intact as a subject of historical enquiry, with its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new ...”

“... had already succeeded in expanding her M.O.W. into M.O.W.O. Having married her maternal cousin, Frank Oliphant, before she ever laid claim to her work, the novelist managed to efface her maiden name and to emerge in print with her mother’s. Since that mother had a fierce conviction of the aristocratic superiority of her family to her husband’s, doubling ...”

“... criticism as well as of forceful recommendation: they take the weight of what there is in the field in order to choose its best representatives. The desiderata of representativeness and intrinsic value serve as checks to each other: the duty of allowing for other tastes balances the power of judgment which an editor enjoys. At any rate New Stories 8 ...”

“... we have identified it as the re-humanising activity, so when it becomes technical or claims a field of its own – when criticism says, ‘Let us be like other departments of knowledge’ – it seems not only to mistake but even to betray its nature. Criticism, in any case, is no longer what it was; and Christopher Norris’s compact book on ...”

“... why Austen readers could find her thoroughly disturbing. Jane Austen and her contemporaries had a frank curiosity about one another’s personalities and lives which often at the time came under fire as vulgar prying. A passion for gossip at all levels made the early 19th century an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking ...”

“... Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of Peterborough, is also alive to the openings offered by high-handed Tory reform in local government and the ...”

“... customs with which they deal, derives from Binchy’s long essay and the other labourers in his field to whom he refers, as far back as that almost legendary figure Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who in virtual solitude composed or induced in 1853, unaided, out of his vast erudition, the first-ever grammar of a tongue one word of which he had never heard spoken and ...”

“... novelist, and so lavish in the employment of his gifts, that his occasional ventures into the field of poetry have in the past tended to be rather disappointing. The miraculous exuberance of his prose, seemingly so inexhaustible in its gathering of perceptions and engendering of conceits, might have led one to hope that his verse would display something ...”

“... and spending four years in the Philippines working for MacArthur, who had a retirement job as Field-Marshal of the tin-pot Philippine Army. When Eisenhower was no longer his golden boy, MacArthur termed him ‘a good clerk, nothing more’. Pearl Harbour brought Eisenhower directly under another Chief of Staff, George Marshall, who immediately sent for ...”

“... of Paul Roazen’s two books about Freud’s less than saintly relations with his followers, or of Frank Sulloway’s exhaustive book about Freud’s reliance on the vulnerable biology and ‘sexology’ of the late 19th century. The more we learn about Freud’s actual grounding in his age, the less possible it will be to sustain the Promethean myth of his ...”

“... because the pleasure produced by the free play of the imagination is intrinsically subversive. As Frank Sinatra puts it, ‘Imagination is silly, it goes around willy-nilly.’ For Steiner, it is the willy-nilliness of imagination that makes it dangerous, and our readiness to indulge that willy-nilliness that makes art matter. Steiner believes, to use an ...”

“... of work were a new existential value. David Storey may have been, even in a heavily contested field, the most inhibited British writer of his generation. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Wakefield, in a family that felt work was destiny and everything else was showing off. His father worked in a coal mine but Storey, while being paid to play rugby ...”