“... than Woolf. Her father was a housemaster at Harrow, and her education – highly privileged, as we may now think – was curiously similar to Woolf’s, for it was undertaken, more or less alone, in her father’s library. She was prodigiously literate and seems to have acquired the kind of social assurance that allows the possessor the privileges of candour ...”

“... of the widely-publicised troubles at the International PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman Mailer’s outbursts bestowed on feminist consideration of masculinity, misogyny and writing. Mailer, president of PEN and chief organiser and fundraiser for the huge writers’ conference, shed his new ...”

“... Afterwards it’s either a cheery wave and back to the motor or a small gin and tonic if I think I may have been recognised. Whatever else I do in the morning I must inspect the Burrell Collection. Brand-new and some miles away in a park. ‘Get as near as possible,’ I told the taxi driver: ‘I always fall down in snow.’ We parked on concrete and ...”

“... and Australian citizens were unknowingly put at risk. A number of people, mainly Aborigines, may have died as a direct result of the fall-out from the blasts. Margaret Thatcher has insisted that no one was used as a guinea pig by the Ministry of Defence: the evidence that she is not telling the truth is overwhelming. Two books, probably the first of a ...”

“... assured cry: ‘Me! Joe! Me!’ However, there is more to it than that. Bertolucci himself may well regard this absence of a sense of self in the character of Caterina as part of the existential characterisation of the New Dramaturgy, of which he claims La Luna to be an example. But surely this absence of gravity, in the sense of weight, this depthless ...”

“... celebrity within it, was intellectually contemptuous of Catholicism. The key to his attitude may be, as Dunne suggests, that as a ‘colonial outsider’ he retained the colon stereotype of the native Irish. Certainly such attitudes were reinforced, rather incongruously, by enlightened secularism when Tone achieved a second identity as a soldier of the ...”

“... exactly what his style says, and this is curiously impressive. The difficulty is that though he may deeply believe it as a man, the style can still sound equivocal because of his well-bred English persona, the image of a spiritual gentleman. His hero and heroine are the victims of the style, instead of really embodying it. As in many one-off ...”

“... was insufferable and that he must do what he could to save it. One or two of his close friends may have wondered whether a memoir should be written; and then put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as “Stubby” – will ...”

“... the fear that the country is winding down and losing its competitive vigour, and the fear that it may fall apart. This tension has, if anything, become more acute. In the Democratic Party contest between Hart and Mondale we saw a growing concern among party supporters that the two candidates’ attacks on each other were ‘tearing apart the party’. Yet, as ...”

“... Well, it has nearly all come true, but it does not particularly elate us. Indeed it may even depress us. But neither the expected elation, nor the depression, are reasonable. The truth is plain that, though a limited amount of social planning is necessary for any well-intentioned government, it is essentially foolish to try to plan a whole ...”

“... the binding, the presence of the original wrappers, the count of plates, and any notes that may have been inserted by former owners or curators. Legman’s 50-page introduction is quirky, reminiscent, indignant, gossipy, truculent and informative, in approximately equal quantities. It is devoted wholly to erotica as articles bought, sold and ...”

“... burst, and that the Jewish population grew as intellectual philo-semitism declined. Toleration may have been the fruit of indifference rather than of enthusiasm – although in the case of Charles II, who liked variety and eccentricity, one might allow something for curiosity as well. In many ways the England of 1700 was, in modern parlance, a more ...”

“... and the erroneous statement that conscription had been accepted by the Government in 1938. One may have reservations about Sir David’s handling of the military politics of the Thirties, but as a biographer he succeeds very well in bringing out the sharp contrast between Brooke the austere, impatient professional soldier and the reserved but emotional and ...”

“... One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary ...”

“... and Vivaldi’s concertos, Scarlatti composed the same piece six hundred times. The pattern may be similar, the bipartite structure with its double bars and repeat marks may be the same. The content is never the same and rarely even similar. Handel is, of course, better-known than this. Or is he? The Water Music and ...”