“... 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 ...”

“... about Saudi Arabia, an anomalous state with which, whatever a humanrights oriented Government may intend, Britain will continue to have close relations for many years. The standard negative images of the Kingdom were easy enough to find in the Aitken saga, and have been amply reinforced by coverage of the trial of two expatriate British nurses accused of ...”

“... Probably it means that a good way to find out what people think is just to ask them. But then, you may object, their replies will be merely subjective – no use really, if you purport to be a scientist. Take back that ‘merely’. Wash your mouth out. Feminist science is something quite different; subjectivity is of the essence. Until recently, women have ...”

“... sessions alone with great pictures acknowledges that access to all this ‘intentional activity’ may be hard: but not because the artists belong to different periods and countries. Psychoanalysis encourages the idea of an unchanging basic structure of the human mind. ‘Beliefs’ and ‘commitments’ have changed greatly, however, and if one admits their ...”

“... months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal’. The phrase was less harsh than it may seem to a modern ear, since a jackal, in the parlance of the time, was someone who busied himself on another’s behalf; but for Crane the metaphor has both a keener and a darker edge. He calls his first chapter ‘The Wolf Cub’, and finds in Trelawny a ...”

“... in 19½ years, will prevent the Slavery, or Murder, of 100!!’ The mathematical projection may have been rickety, but what houseproud humanitarian could resist a purchase like that? And what housekeeper could fail to ensure that the bowl was always correctly filled? It is well to remember that, in the bloody annals of prized commodities, sugar occupies ...”