“... In a spirited attempt to forestall criticism, Margaret Doody warns her readers that they may ‘feel horrified at what they they regard as a changeling-substitution of a mad Gothic feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in Evelina and the Journals, Professor Doody sets out to present an altogether different version ...”

“... he explains, because ‘child protection agencies made access to children impossible.’ But one may feel that the omission is a ‘serious defect’ of the most unarguable sort, such that Dr Li should have contemplated redesigning his research once the agencies created obstacles (if this is indeed what happened). So much hinges on the experience of the ...”

“... debts to Bentham and Mill, even to Arnold, were largely those of a debater who picks up whatever may usefully be gleaned from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his literary career, had presumed a conflict of Science and Poetry subsequently rewrote ...”

“... omitted. Faulkner’s ungrateful and ungracious treatment of his early mentor, Sherwood Anderson, may be charitably interpreted as youthful high jinks (although Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished middle age to young women to come and inspect his valuable etchings (alias the manuscripts of his famous novels) ...”

“... of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring the new growth of leaves.’ There is almost a Bethlehem feel about this: a new light in the sky and various ...”

“... Bloom’s own Romantic project, his bid to dissolve the boundaries between poetry and criticism may seem opportunistic. But it’s also true – or at least an article of Romantic faith – that ambitious writers must create the taste by which they’ll be appreciated. Orwell acutely criticised H. G. Wells for being ‘too sane’ to understand the modern ...”

“... to verge on anarchy, with Gorbachev’s reforms in real danger of being overtaken by events. He may control the state, but does the state control society? From the outset people have asked whether Gorbachev and perestroika can succeed. Now the question is whether the USSR itself will survive, and pessimistic, even apocalyptic answers are suddenly in ...”

“... now. It came out in French in 1964, taking a quarter of a century to reach translation. What, one may wonder, have the French been up to meanwhile? One answer comes from Volume One of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, also a translation from the originals of Michel Rouche, Evelyne Patlagean and others. This, too, is a most engaging ...”

“... on Victorian and modern literature are published now. The theoretical essays will come out next May. Born in 1928, Miller took his first degree in science. He converted to literature as a graduate and was steeped in New Criticism during its most doctrinaire phase. He describes his emancipation from its discipline as something comparable to Dorothea’s loss ...”

“... too, like all migrants, am a fantasist,’ declares the narrator of Shame, and the proposition may be a reversible one. In Rushdie’s prose the migrant occupies a specific geographical and temporal position, ‘wandering between two worlds’. (In The Satanic Verses these are, literally, Bombay and London.) In the introduction to Imaginary Homelands the ...”

“... is partly devoted to a critique of Neusner, and is a Significant salvo in a continuing battle that may decide the future course of rabbinic studies. Sanders’s book may be regarded as a series of learned appendices to Jesus and Judaism (including a detailed reconsideration of Jesus’s alleged clashes with the ...”

“... at will. Discussion and electivity were characteristic of the Party’s internal procedures. It may be that what inhibits Pipes from recording this is a feeling that by doing so he would somehow be making the Bolsheviks into democrats. This is not a necessary conclusion. The Bolsheviks had constantly paraded their lack of commitment to following democratic ...”

“... only as a first novel. As a novel, of course, it must be assessed, no matter what adjectives it may have picked up from the papers. It tells the story, then, of two English girls, aged seven and five, whose mother took them on the hippy trail to Morocco in the Sixties. The woman – ‘Mum’, as she is called with inaccurate cosiness’ – is calmly ...”

“... when Armageddon was scheduled to begin, was the civilian hero of the Gulf War. The only thing that may have puzzled them was his title. How could a man edit reports coming from all quarters of the globe if he deliberately isolated himself under conditions of siege? On this matter From the House of War provides little help, except for a passing reference to the ...”

“... and rich in colour: after all, the Greeks were not minimalists – nor even, paradoxical as it may sound, Classicists. My argument is this: Apelles was admired for his virtuosity. There is a story of a contest between him and the painter Protogenes, in which the latter drew a line inside a very fine line first drawn by Apelles, which he left as a kind of ...”