“... and doubts. So good are Jenny Uglow’s discussions of the Gaskell novels that the actual texts may not quite live up to them, although she conveys their virtues with a kind of discernment very much in tune with her subject’s own. As one would expect, Mrs Gaskell got steadily better as a writer as she went on, learning and perceiving more until the moment ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years, Wharton must be regarded as immortal. As far as I know, I never met either, although I may have swapped punches or half-pints with one or other in the mid-Fifties, when I was one of the Daily Express interlopers in the back bar of the King and Keys. But what they both describe is the story of my life as well as theirs. Both books tell the story of ...”

“... the radiant, divergent final paragraph, is to be invaded or colonised: hanging on to your own life may mean the excommunication of all others. Relying on the complexity of its narrative threading, on detail, voice and perspective, the story offers one further aesthetic surprise: a range of sympathy capable of embracing both the mother’s brave self-delusion ...”

“... to the observer’s eye the same proximal stimulus pattern as does the real scene.’ The picture may thus be construed as a section through the visual pyramid, and if, with Leonardo, we imagine this as a pane of glass, the artistic success consists in marking the glass’s surface in such a way that there is no perceptual difference to be registered between ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by Professor Fussell and his precursors may make it appear. For it rests on an underlying assumption that Americans treat each other as if they were all, whatever the other differences between them, of common social origin. None of them seriously believes that they are, any more than they believe that ...”