“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... How many of our highbrows, for example, the ones who get the lead reviews, write as well as, say, Michael Dibdin, author of the haunting Ratking? P.D. James’s new novel seems to return us straight to Auden’s theology. It is set in rural East Anglia, and takes its title from the Anglican prayer book: ‘We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost ...”

“... in Red River, Ethan Edwards had upped the ante to genocidal.’ But along with Martin Pawley, the young part-Cherokee civilised Indian who joins Ethan in his quest, the audience finds itself caught up in the chase. We may finally break with Ethan, as Martin does, when, discovering that his niece is cohabiting with the Indian ringleader, he determines to kill ...”

“... What I want,’ a young Luis Buñuel announced to the audience at an early screening of his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), ‘is for you not to like the film … I’d be sorry if it pleased you.’ The film’s opening scene, which culminates in a close-up of a straight-edge razor being drawn through a woman’s eyeball, is often taken as the epitome of cinema’s potential to do violence to its audience ...”

“... of the other stuff in supermarkets should just be binned. A recent, very austere contribution by Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food (Allen Lane, £16.99) argues that one should only eat things that have been nourished by sunlight. But what are creatures that are allergic to sunlight supposed to do? I don’t mean moles, who will occasionally make their way ...”

“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

“... A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes a good excuse to look back at the spiky virtues of ...”

“... we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church ...”

“... a brigade on the now entrenched Western Front, and had tried unsuccessfully to get this brilliant young French-speaking officer to be his brigade major. Churchill had written to Clemmie, ‘I like him very much and he is entirely captivated,’ and in October 1916 he was writing to ‘My dear Louis’, who was recuperating after his last wound, in very ...”

“... and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who ...”

“... imaginative benefits, weakens any intended social point. So it is no surprise that Stuart Hood and Michael Dibdin concern themselves with the present state of society and morality via Science Fiction and a crime story. Both have produced ingenious – indeed, immensely clever – fictions. Hood’s Peter Sinclair, a battered ‘historical materialist’ (aka ...”

“... Reprint Library, with (as readers of the London Review of Books will know) an Introduction by Michael Holroyd, which identifies ‘David Peterley’ as an artistic fiction and argues a persuasive case for the book’s worth and raison d’être. Let me dwell a moment or two on the ‘crime’ aspect. Publishers like to exploit the weakness for mystery of ...”

“... It is easy to loathe Michael Howard. It is less easy – because more intimidating in its implications – to loathe him for the right reasons. His record as Home Secretary before Her Majesty’s judges is appalling. He has lost a succession of cases to do with prisoners, immigrants and criminal injuries compensation ...”

“... twists. Finally, the meditations on race, sex and the loss of political innocence of the novel’s young male narrator, offspring of a black father and white mother, take the work far beyond the category of topical satire. Anonymous has been strongly influenced by All the King’s Men (1946). His narrator, Henry Burton, the preppy, intellectual grandson of a ...”

“... by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in New South Wales owned by his patron. Here, ...”