“... and novelty: we see people we know in fresh contexts. The reader’s self-congratulation may be checked as he encounters characters beyond his ken, but this provokes the humbling and enhancing awareness that the range of texts that might be called literary is now so vast that no one could ever experience more than a fraction of it. The Leavisian hope ...”

“... Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over another. Her novel writing career began brilliantly and precociously with A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), published when she was 24. Since then, the preoccupations of her novels have generally kept pace with ...”

“... in achieving them; and the circumstances of its undoing’. Some historical works induce, whatever may have been the author’s intentions, a sense of inevitability – a feeling that events simply had to happen this way and that nothing could have diverted them from the course they actually took. Others constantly evoke questions of what might have been. This ...”

“... understand the significance of geological formations and the shapes of watercourses. Nowadays, he may overfly large sites in a helicopter. Feng shui means ‘wind and water’. Wind and water have formed the land, and are still at work on it and within it. They carry yin and yang, and chi. Chi can be blown away or leak away, but a site must be sufficiently ...”

“... would be graceless to grumble; and the cold eye seems disconcertingly aware of what our reactions may be, frequently addressing us as ‘Reader’, with a little flip of the wrist. In any case, the reader interested in the American stage and screen in the Thirties would certainly be gripped by the last quarter of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband ...”

“... of his audience’s living morality into Tolstoy’s canonical fiction is very like what readers may feel who prefer their village vignettes drawn with a sharper pen. The breadth of Hocking’s sympathy imposes a strain. Even the voice in the book which comes closest to being the author’s – that of Michael’s aunt, a writer, typically found suppressing ...”

“... Drogin asks himself at one point. The answer is no, but he is not in his right mind, and may never get back. The characters in Jay Gummerman’s ten delicate and edgy stories don’t look within, and it wouldn’t do them much good if they did. They would see only a glare or mist, a landscape full of blank or broken signposts. But they don’t look ...”

“... the US Administration did to Eden’s government three decades previously. The US position in 1989 may not have been as strong as its actions made it appear, but the difficulties faced by the Soviet Union could hardly be exaggerated. Most commentators were astonished by the speed of the collapse of its Eastern European empire. Within a matter of months, almost ...”

“... Reserve Bank) ‘informal’ activities – called, by those who dislike them, ‘black’ – may contribute as much as 40 per cent of the domestic product. Vargas Llosa exaggerates when he says that ‘the vast majority of those who write and theorise about the backwardness and iniquity of life in the Third World do not seem to be aware’ of this ...”

“... to make the running in a debate which was to lead to the White Paper on ‘Employment Policy’ of May 1944 – the one Mrs Thatcher used to carry about in her handbag. The Section’s opening paper focused on the counter-cyclical management of total demand, with the clear implication that in depressions the Budget should run into deficit, debt being repaid in ...”

“... what is perhaps the DNB’s chief pleasure: it leaves us to divine the ‘real story’ that may or may not lurk behind its polite graveside presentations. With the best-known entrants, we will very likely have – or soon be getting – some other, more unbuttoned narrative. For most, though, the DNB’s biography ...”

“... his fiction is that ‘the personal element is there’ – an understatement that ranks with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than ...”

“... Greene and Durrell on the whole do not, and are honest and solid achievements, even though they may lack the touch of real originality in, say, J.G. Farrell’s trilogy. Burgess’s later Enderby Trilogy, by contrast, already shows too much self-indulgence, and his fatal tendency to achieve an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a ...”

“... on the crest of the wave by the enormous financial and critical success of In Memoriam. But it may be that her closeness, in every sense, enhanced the doubleness which is an invisible and often incongruous presence in later poems, as if a ‘correct’ persona were sometimes being needled into word magic by an incorrect and unregenerate one. This is ...”

“... light at pedestrian crossings for four or five minutes even if there isn’t a car in sight. These may be trite examples but Switzerland’s love of rules has more sinister manifestations, such as people denouncing their neighbours to the police for quite minor infractions of the law. Mitya New’s book, a series of interviews with people who at different ...”