“... will seem little more than an apology for sensationalism. If pattern predominates, the characters may decline into automata. The author is likely to have his work cut out to sustain a level of psychological and emotional realism adequate to his proposed action. Even if he strikes the right balance in each separate episode, the total effect ...”

“... of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when such themes are handled.’ We may find Leavis’s circumlocution itself rather coy (‘Mrs Transome’s early lapse’), but I think it surprising that critics have not generally taken his lead and tackled the question of sexuality in the novels head-on. A glance back to contemporary ...”

“... between seeing and understanding is left nicely unresolved by a phrase in which ‘blind’ may suggest either the loss of the means to understanding or the grace of an understanding that decides its own means. Bainbridge is not a man to let understanding have its own way: he will interpret his life to his own satisfaction. He is shrewdly alert to his ...”

“... cities snugly inside their walls: outside is grass and trees. It is beginning to seem that this may be an interesting fiction. Outside the walls, some recent studies suggest, we should be visualising not just grass but under-enfranchised shanty suburbs, non-citizen peasants with a version of feudal duty to till the fields in order to feed the town, and ...”

“... seems now to evoke so different an atmosphere that I doubt if it is worth reading about: but I may be wrong. There are, of course, the exploration sports, mountaineering, fell-walking, diving, even flying light aeroplanes, where one may yet spin a good yarn based on adventures and achievements in interesting and ...”

“... adverse criticism, but by and large his view of his brother’s work is clouded with stars, if I may put it that way. And anyway, his notion of what poetry is chimes discordantly with mine. ‘Technique is important in poetry only so that it may reveal the supernatural.’ Or, more unevasively still: ‘As Patrick read his ...”

“... a canter to the battlefield that is divisiveness and in the ensuing contest of wills the rider may fall off. One cavalry unit has, for the moment, ceased to exist. It ought to follow, but apparently does not, that when a right-wing government contrives to heighten social divisions rather than to obscure them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained ...”

“... condemned to live in the shadow of apocalypse, without certainties or hope of moral progress, may explain why, from her first book to her last, all Tuchman’s work has dealt with wars: their origins, their consequences and, above all, what it was like to fight in them. At a time when professional historians were beginning to turn their backs on ...”

“... I do not know the answer. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent primarily against nuclear attack. They may not deter aggression by ‘conventional’ (i.e. non-nuclear) forces, because in the event of, say, the Soviet Army invading Western Europe, it is not credible that the United States would pull the nuclear trigger, inviting a nuclear holocaust. Yet even here ...”

“... then threatened not to pay; and the Commission started legal proceedings against them. They may end up in the dock at the European Court. Future historians of Europe may see the whole story as a constitutional struggle, like royal feuds with the House of Commons in Britain, or federal versus states’ rights in the ...”

“... you ask yourself why he did not shoot himself, or rather begin to wonder, nervously, whether he may not try to. The laments about a writer’s life, which are the dominating theme of his letters, are quite agonising. To Cunninghame Graham he writes, 16 February 1898: ‘Cher ami, I did not write because I was beastly seedy – nerve trouble – a taste of ...”

“... Readers of the old Eagle may remember that educative comic’s colourful centre-spread, where every week the latest triumphs of British technology (this was the new Elizabethan age) would be dissected for the enlightenment of British boyhood (girls read the Girl). The cutaway drawing, the arrow and the numbered part explained the workings of the jet engine or the diesel locomotive, or how Hunt’s expedition scaled Everest with oxygen masks and Kendal mint cake ...”

“... but about Jarrell’s one cannot be so sure. Of this query he was himself acutely aware, and it may have contributed to his mysterious death – accident or suicide – struck by a car when walking on a main road. The tone and import of his letters are as bland as apple pie, and their reader has no sense of the tensions and traumas that led him to mental ...”

“... for claiming that what I do is relevantly different from what Conan Doyle did falls away, why may we not suppose that Conan Doyle’s pretended references are real references too? The answer ‘Because there was no already existing fictional character for him to be referring to’ (cf. page 71) would apply at best to the first sentence, or perhaps the ...”

“... The present commentator refuses to play the game. He recognises Tippett’s genius, even though he may not sufficiently understand it. But he also recognises confusion and vagueness for what they are – an inadequacy. Good or bad, for better or worse, this review isn’t worth your attention unless you accept that there is no substitute for, no viable ...”