“... women on the edge of breakdown, but they looked pretty robust, if a bit impatient.’ It may be that Mass-Observation encouraged her in a habit which came naturally. Since most of us can bear the sufferings of others with fortitude, it would be wrong to mock Nella Last’s obsession with visions of drowning sailors and slaughtered hosts: but she does ...”

“... about the use of the SPG, and the ‘Sus’ law, or criticism of ‘Operation Swamp’? These may be examined when the Clutterbuck opus is next up-dated. In this book, he falls back on the eroding effects of television drama and documentary. Heavy fire is concentrated on Gordon Newman’s four-part series Law and Order, which he dismisses as agitprop ...”

“... regular ‘streets’ of cumulus clouds that develop by convection on a sunny afternoon; or they may keep stopping and starting, with uncanny regularity, marking out time like a slowly beating heart. In other words, the forms of living beings are not static equilibrium patterns like the rows of atoms in a crystal, but are ordered dynamically and maintained ...”

“... like this. In a century from now, when the nature of ‘Modernism’ will be clearer, the pundits may, after all, decide that ‘Modern Art’ (as distinct from Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism and the many lesser eddies all conscientiously described by Harold Osborne) is no more useful as a term than Romanticism or Classicism have been in helping us to ...”

“... might doubt the first argument, and indeed the second: Lycoris, like Propertius’s Cynthia, may have remained a symbol long after she ceased to be a siren). In that case, the great man is Julius, not Octavian; the compliment is an early rung on the ladder to the top. The third poem is another epigram: ‘Now at last the Muses have made me poems that I ...”

“... than Nazi Germany or even Franco’s Spain. One cannot admit to being bored with the problem but may wonder what else there is to say. In A Sport of Nature Miss Gordimer breaks out of the enclave with a novel about a Jewish girl who makes love to black Africans, travels around the world and returns to her homeland, ‘the new African state that used to be ...”

“... modern blockbuster, is over six hundred and fifty pages long), a dimly observable possibility that may have to be confronted if things really get out of hand. Fortunately for yarn-lovers everywhere, they don’t. The war that Clancy has imagined is fought, from its beginning in a Soviet sneak attack across the Fulda Gap to its end in a settlement negotiated by ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... thejaymakesanswerasthemagpiechatters andalltheairisfilledwithpleasantnoiseofwaters It may be asked how readers were supposed to tell that ‘allnight’ at the end of the first line belonged to ‘aroaringinthewind’ rather than ‘theraincameheavily’, or that ‘inthedistantwoods’ belonged to ‘thebirdsaresinging’ rather than ...”

“... tide of lives, from the tenderness I saw in thousands of eyes watching me together. This message may not come to all poets, but anyone who has felt it will keep it in his heart, will work it into his poems. Luis Poirot’s photographic study of Neruda and Nerudiana was originally published, in a limited edition, in Chile in 1986, during the Pinochet ...”

“... omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change ... any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing.’ In Moo Smiley moves from the claustrophobic confines of family life to the wide open spaces of a Midwestern agricultural college, trading dark drama for four hundred pages of proficient ...”

“... Ehrlich’s detachment from her body introduces a new phase in her attempts at survival. Her mouth may not obey her instructions, but this failure enables her to separate her idea of herself from her suffering body, so that the woman who wishes to laugh is no longer the woman dying, but a friend at the bedside of that woman. This new attitude helps ...”

“... disgracefully cowardly circumstances, when he was ejected by the then chairman of selectors, Peter May. It is necessary to know his approach to captaincy, which, as seen from the periphery, was the equivalent of riding a bike with your feet on the handlebars (he would argue that provided you don’t crash you would still get to the bottom of the hill this ...”

“... James thought that the fear of open spaces could be due to a resurrection of an instinct ‘which may in some of our more remote ancestors have had a permanent and ... useful part to play’. Freud too saw phobias as having to do with self-protection, but where for James the open space evokes evolutionary memory, for Freud it evokes personal memory, and the ...”

“... I have heard people say that the Budget was a bore. This may be true for those who had to listen to it or for those who are interested in minutiae. But as one interested primarily in economic strategy, I cannot remember a more intriguing situation. How can it possibly be right to propose a huge tax increase for next year, and an even larger one for the year after that, when by general consent unemployment is going to be in the region of three million and rising? I am going to argue that this Budget only makes sense on very special assumptions about the performance of the economy; and that if, a year from now, the situation is broadly unchanged – if, that is, output has not changed much, with unemployment still around three million and the balance of payments not in serious deficit – it will be every bit as wrong to raise taxes then as it would now ...”