“... no cooker, no cup, no plate, no spoon. The cupboards were bare. She had been without heat or light for nearly three years. The gas supply had been disconnected at her own request. She made no reply to numerous letters form the Electricity Board. Circulars offering easy-payment schemes and coloured brochures touting the latest hi-tech innovations were ...”

“... Rosen’s The Classical Style, Hans Keller on Mozart, Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music or Alan Walker’s An Anatomy of Music Criticism, Kerman, like Lang’s Hindu ascetic, may seem in danger of losing the larger view. The complaint against musicologists is not new either: Carl Engel (one of the founding fathers of American musicology) is demolished ...”

“... both clarifies the significance of this important period in his subject’s career and throws new light on it. The first thing that should strike anyone, and indeed the overall impression of this book, is that however much Orwell despaired and bellyached about what he was doing (and his reaction would have been much the same wherever he’d been), he took his ...”

“... but unreachable world beyond mess and ‘undeftness’: His fees are large, his cares are light, His analytic eyes are bright, He glows with pride as well he might. The analyst is always right. Although several of Tessimond’s poems (nine of them, to be precise) begin ‘I am’, his work is rarely directly autobiographical. The ‘I am’ poems ...”

“... Newton Minow and Craig LaMay’s book is not the first account of the history of the debates (Alan Schroeder’s Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, first published in 2001, has just been updated and reissued). But Minow, as former head of the Federal Communications Commission and a founder member of the Commission on Presidential ...”

“... he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life’. Alan Hollinghurst, in his acute introduction to this new edition, says the same thing. James thought he could, however, take up – these are Lubbock’s words again – ‘a story of remote and phantasmal life’. This was The Sense of the Past, James’s other ...”

“... them to be seen as a unit. Green’s conviction that ‘the Oedipodeia rises gradually towards the light; the Oresteia is imbued with the power of darkness’ is a gross simplification of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonnus, and simply inaccurate as a description of the end of the Eumenides. Here again, Green has been led astray by his obsession with ‘mirror ...”

“... those of a puffed-up schoolboy prize-winner. The war, however, shows him in a steadily worse light. During his snatches of leave he torments both his fiancée and his mother by his aloofness: he browbeats shop assistants by flaunting his service at the Front: his emotional repertoire consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read ...”

“... Annie Dillard (1945-) and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom ...”

“... ennobled. While Nantwich was incarcerated, his Sudanese servant of 28 years’ standing, ‘the light of my life’, was killed in ‘an act of racial hatred and ignorance’. It isn’t quite clear how far the events of The Swimming-Pool Library lead Will to realise the limitations of his own behaviour and world-view. For the reader, those limitations ...”

“... characterise nobody but Clive James. It would matter less if he were less ignorant. He describes Alan Wearne’s verse novel The Nightmarkets as ‘so solidly or anyway heavily involved in the tradition of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky and the yellow pages of the telephone directory’. Here, in neat reversal, only the joke is right. Wearne does have a telephone ...”

“... it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became ...”

“... any partner to them. Quotations from Lawrence, Joyce, the pseudonymous Laurence St Clair, Alan Hollinghurst and others, and Nussbaum’s extended commentary on them, provide ample opportunity (not taken advantage of) to have index entries for ‘cocks, soaping of in showers’, ‘erection, elephantine’, ‘genital organs, the calling by proper ...”

“... all of nature was a vast system of energy flows, an image made increasingly familiar by the new light and power systems of 1900, with energy ultimately to be identified with the favoured ghost of idealist philosophy, Spirit itself. Boltzmann found himself an increasingly lonely voice, battling repeatedly against the easy charms of energetics in the name of ...”

“... of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ‘journaler’, there’s now a whole industry ...”