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“... venture on ‘Art’. Amis is listed by Hugh Kenner as an example of the post-(Second-World-) War trough in the English arts, a case of ‘anarchic energies ... there to draw applause’. Amis doesn’t always, of course, draw applause-there are English readers too who reckon him a philistine, and who neither like nor admire the books; and he clearly ...”

“... and then (after she cuts their meetings short) with a pretty, dark-haired young woman in his class called Melanie, whom he nicknames Meláni, ‘the dark one’. Lurie is described as having sex with Melanie some three or four times, during which she remains inert, barely co-operative. Shortly afterwards, she charges him with harassment. Hauled up before ...”

“... has produced it. In this respect, Howells lies open to extreme misunderstanding. The narrow middle-class ‘selfishness’ of merely familial affection is liable to be shrunk and chilled by the sweeping Tolstoyan perspective of full human possibility, one he needs to be felt as consciously holding back from. Likewise the Kentons’s provinciality may arouse ...”

“... with relish and approval is the one he heard Coleridge give in the winter of 1798 – an anti-war oration by a poet who would eventually choose not to join the Unitarians after all. Any final inference about Hazlitt and Dissent ought to be complex. His turn from the faith was not a defection, and one only stands back, a little, at Paulin’s decision to ...”

“... at the sheer unlikeliness of what he’s up to: Einstein bent the Universe     To make war obsolete. Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush     The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced     The new age with a tweet.The butcherbird is in fact native to Australia, but that doesn’t stop Hughes punning on its name in ...”

“... of honeybees, known as colony collapse disorder, is not global warming but a widely used class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids that mimic the effects of nicotine and act as nerve poisons. Honeybees pollinate about a third of the world’s crops, and their disappearance would eliminate foods such as cucumbers, berries, almonds and avocados from ...”

“... word. What about that? That’s what it means to die an honourable warrior, on your shield, your war-cry on your lips!’ It was Uncle Vasily who took the little Pushkin, in 1811, to his admission interview at the new lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles south of Petersburg, where the boy would make several enduring friendships, and where he wrote 29 ...”

“... silicon eyeballs and pricey MRS degrees from Stanford. Not to mention the usual klatsch of ruling-class hangers-on: radical Botoxers; Pilates Instructors for Peace and Zero Body Fat; members of the pedicure-rights community – all Teetering-for-Hillary in black sheath dresses and fuck-me pumps. Since it takes a village, we anticipate, too, the requisite ...”

“... the Convivio, written in his first years of exile, the nobility is assessed more positively as a class which, despite being infiltrated and corrupted by merchants and moneymen, has the duty of providing the community with a peaceful, civilised existence under the auspices of the empire. This shift in position, which now recognises the value of noble birth ...”

“... with time and/or funds and/ or stamina running out. While no serious artist ever wants gender or class or any other contingency or circumstance adduced as any sort of an excuse for anything, it’s also a fact that The Last Samurai is a novel in which we witness WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING? the captivating sibylline voice continually interrupted by that of the ...”

“... of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was reinstated on condition that he took a special test every three years. He managed to ...”

“... sympathy with the scale of what he is describing, the medium of it, and its purpose. The idea of a class or even of a whole population taking ship to better itself, or even to survive, will have been disagreeable to him, with his promotion of passivity and his feudal and static playing-card version of society. It wasn’t in him to see desperate emigrants as ...”

“... nor does standard scene-setting. The siblings attend a school where a teacher can be bullied in class by oblique references to her son, who has been arrested on suspicion of killing farm animals (including a lamb that Rosa watched learning to walk), something that strongly suggests a rural community, but no attempt is made to describe or evoke the ...”

“... the name of the town in which the Karamazovs live?’ was the sort of question he liked to ask his class, rather than anything more existential. When Mason wanted to write about Joyce and the ideas of the philosopher Giambattista Vico, which might seem a perfectly good idea given Joyce’s professed interest in him, Ellmann dismissed it out of hand: ‘all ...”

“... You were ill, but you might not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into ...”