“... house Unbound) in March 2017 and ends with a ‘post-conclusion’ written just after Theresa May called last June’s snap election. At that point, May’s victory seemed certain, ‘given the apparent unelectability of the opposition’. In hindsight, Barnett must be glad of that ‘apparent’, and of having gone on ...”

“... if Sylvie and Ruthie, escaping from Fingerbone, crossing the railway bridge perilously on foot, may (or may not) hear in a moment of extremity ‘some word so true we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerves like darkness or water’. The book itself, of course, is a redemptive act, a way of ...”

“... the whole category is in danger of sinking without trace. This theoretical death of the subject may reflect among other things some rather more tangible disappearances. In the era of Auschwitz, events take place that slip over the horizon of any conceivable experience. Only intellectuals, one might think, could regard experience as a category in its own ...”

“... we have, which itself contains only a fraction of the material available to the editor. Readers may find it useful to have at hand Ian Hamilton’s masterly biography, first published in 1983, if only to provide more continuity, close some of the gaps in the story. He is thorough, lucid and just (admiring and condemning), and it is a bonus that his comments ...”

“... sack of stale bread for her pigs. More enlightening was the remark made to him by Churchill in May 1940 when France fell, and passed on to Liddell: ‘The end,’ Churchill is supposed to have said, ‘is very near, but there will be no surrender. We shall go down fighting.’ This suggests that when Churchill made his ‘Fight them on the ...”

“... do: it gives a shape to its subject’s life; but it also offers enough detail so that the reader may, if he wishes, construct a different, alternative shape. Day-Lewis senior seems to have thought a good deal about the shape of his own life, and in his writings suggested two possible patterns. Looking back over his work in 1951, in the preface to the Penguin ...”

“... aristocratic grandeur. Some indication of Mayfair’s stately, splendid and sumptuous past may be gleaned from the acknowledgements page in this appropriately stately, splendid and sumptuous volume, where names like Abercorn, Derby, Mountbatten, Scarbrough and Wemyss surge before the reader’s eye, in a cascade of coronets. Since Lady Bracknell’s ...”

“... from one half of a simile to the other.An even larger presence in Tawada’s imagination, however, may be Paul Celan. She once planned on writing an academic essay on him; instead, he became the absent subject of Spontaneous Acts (published in the US as Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel). The novella is so waywardly digressive that it’s hard to describe ...”

“... most boring village in the world and Marxism can only go so far’. Vargas Llosa, then, may have been rewarded for agreeing to visit at all. But Aguirre and Buynova suggest another reason. ‘Loyal’ communist writers were often not treated particularly well, since their commitment to the cause was taken for granted. But Soviet literary ...”

“... West’. America has always been some kind of ‘West’. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and others may have stayed in the East (relatively speaking), but they spoke and wrote endlessly about the West. Huck Finn decided to keep moving on, and what he talked about (if anything) when he lit out ahead of the rest, we can never know. When he took up the West, he ...”

“... My own theory is that for most Britons South America has just been discovered. A Task Force may succeed where reviewers have failed: that great comma of a continent may have become commercial at last, thus enabling Marquez and all the other members of ‘El Boom’, the great explosion of brilliance in contemporary ...”

“... Thursday 27 May. Flight MA 611 from Heathrow to Budapest. The purpose of my visit is to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview of the event: a record 112 new titles are to be published for this year’s festival, with a total printing of three and a quarter million copies ...”

“... in animals, without repression, as independent motives with no sexual context. Thus, though there may well be a constant mutual influence between the motives, there can scarcely be a monolithic empire of the kind Freud proposed. 2. Freud is ahistorical. In spite of his real interest in history and archaeology, he treated the society of his day and city as a ...”

“... role differentiation is unjust and eliminable. He also suggests that experimental evidence may show that at least some male and female behavioural traits are biologically-based. However, it is less than clear that nature/nurture disputes can be experimentally resolved: the evidence we have of male and female differentiation is always evidence of the ...”

“... The discovery of insulin may be rated the first great triumph of medical science. The first important contribution of the great pharmaceutical companies to human welfare was surely the preparation, purification, standardisation and marketing of insulin in a form suitable for self-administration by the afflicted patients ...”