“... without aeroplanes or electricity, to a time and a place where a trip across the Atlantic that took only five days was a projector’s fantasy. Do we regret or celebrate their passing? Do we applaud or bewail the new speed and laxity? Which is the age of innocence, then or now? The movie doesn’t attend to the passage of time in this way – it leaves ...”

“... names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels all over their garments, like graffiti gangs registering their ‘tags’, but does not speculate on why the human race has felt irresistibly drawn to providing such a miscellany of reading-matter on chest and back. Is it part of the ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... changing rapidly and competition for housing was intense, serious inter-racial hostility mainly took the form of what Pilkington calls the ‘white riot’. The same thing is referred to in some of the relevant American literature as a ‘communal’ or ‘contested-area riot’ – the Chicago riot of 1919 offers one of the most spectacular ...”

“... is employed as an adviser to ABB, which was in the dire condition of the dinosaur when von Koerber took over. Drastic, innovative action had to be taken, first by sacking 10 per cent of the workforce (downsizing, restructuring, rationalising) who, not realising the creativity of the act, were unconvinced of the long-term benefits (for the company) and chorused ...”

“... the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his bag, and were turned into stone. What goes for seeing also goes for imagining we are seeing. We do a lot of such imagining, and many of the books, news pictures, films and television images we enjoy are designed to stimulate ...”

“... prestige rested. No wonder he was looked on as a threat to vested interests by his colleagues. It took a long time for the French to be impressed by his masterpiece on the Mediterranean. He published it at his own expense; it remained out of print for many years. Only when an English translation appeared, and was greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the ...”

“... trouble in drumming up a fan club. Satanism is in this sense just the flipside of suburbia. As John Carey has observed, the grotesque freaks who populate the fringes of a Dickens novel represent the sadistic vengeance which the text wreaks on its own decorous middle-class story-line. Nobody would ask Oliver Twist to dinner if they could hook Fagin ...”

“... proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their clothes are more interesting. It ...”

“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret conventicles, forbidden ...”

“... novel had been wholly dire in their presentation of warfare since the Napoleonic Wars. Linklater took a middling position. In one of his autobiographies, Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970), he wrote regarding his own Private Angelo: ‘War, in Italy, was a drunken, destructive and impertinent clown; to deal justly and truthfully with it, one had to keep one’s ...”

“... run out and that’s that. Yes, that was Boycott’s finest innings yet: Those fifteen runs that took three days to get. Boycott was born to give the Wisden bores The perfect subject for their lucubrations. He is the average oaf whose average scores Are averaged out in their long computations, Reducing you to helpless yawns and snores. Like small boys ...”