“... Proust’ when ‘barely out of nursery’, while also prompting the suspicion that they may only ever have pretended to leave it (the nursery I mean). The photograph also illustrates the Oriental aspect of their faces, which was pronounced in their military father, who was known as ‘Puffadder’. This was the legacy of a Malaysian ...”

“... a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure. Bech is a strange antitype, a funhouse distortion, of his inventor. He is Jewish and ...”

“... quasi-autonomous research establishment, funded in perpetuity by an inattentive government. EHE may well have exhausted its mission, or lost its intellectual drive, and the right thing to do might well be to close it down or merge it with some other establishment. However wisely a research programme may have been ...”

“... believe that it has a more sinister implication than Professor Hough would allow. The 13th Cycle may be the realm of an ultimate freedom. It may be the realm into which the Cuchulainn of the plays would pass were he to offer his history as legend to the world. It may be the God that is ...”

“... to a lamp-post knows that, once started, they acquire a certain unstoppability. Common sense may say that they should be stopped, but nothing short of a fiasco will make that politically possible. It was fervently hoped in parts of Whitehall that the Concorde airliner would develop a technical fault somewhere along the line so that it could be declared ...”

“... phoned from a restaurant and told the silence at the other end that she would be back by ten. She may have been trying to fool her friends, but the trick was aimed at least as much at herself: it was as if she hoped her father would stop pretending to be dead and pick up the phone. Levine reveals that that night was the first time she displayed any physical ...”

“... When my father reached Paris from Russia in May 1919, the man who met them at the Gare de Lyon was Uncle Alyosha. My father was six at the time and he has no memory whatever of the tall, soldierly gentleman with a moustache. Instead his memory darts unerringly to the thing which mattered to him at that moment in his life ...”

“... But since our only national cult is the Royal Family, James Agate’s less flattering verdict may also be more appropriate: ‘The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.’ Other nations’ great men, however, are a different matter. Perhaps because Napoleon was born on one small island and died on another, many of ...”

“... practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off at dawn on 20 May 1927 for his historic flight across the Atlantic, the runway at Roosevelt Field, New York, was sodden; The Spirit of St Louis was carrying a thousand pounds more weight than ever before, and its engine was not generating full power because of the ...”

“... others was his apparent failure to recognise Scott’s antagonism towards him. This antagonism may have been rooted in the fact that Gran was Norwegian. Before Amundsen announced his intention to sail south, Gran’s being Norwegian was little problem, but after Amundsen’s famous, brutally terse telegram reached Scott in Melbourne, it was a different ...”

“... is not demonstrable, but that it cannot without circularity be shown to be even probable. It may be that later authors have been able to make out a case for applying canons of rationality to inductive procedures, but it was rather Hume’s way to contrast rationality with what he regarded as the legitimate force of custom. One gets a very different ...”

“... is not lived out within the context of a single set of synchronous events, however neatly they may appear to fit together into a single functioning whole. And that perhaps is the main point in Marc Augé’s slim volume of critical essays. He perceives the various schools of anthropology, both past and present, as identified with three primary axes which ...”

“... that some of us have come to expect and delight in, it provides others that many readers may well prefer. And after all the signs were always there, if we had cared to look. Rereading in The Occasions of Poetry Gunn’s essay on Ben Jonson, one notices for the first time how difficult he finds it to enter into Jonson’s world. The difficulties can ...”

“... novels are more a matter of attrition, perhaps not quite beyond amendment: purgatorial, it may be, rather than infernal. When a distinguished art-historian changes tack and writes a novel, what would we expect? Some mystery about attributions, high life in a Berensonian ambience? Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life is not like that at all. It has a dual ...”

“... South African half of the book I cannot pronounce. Passages of untranslated Afrikaans in the text may stop many readers getting to the comparative note at the end. What Dr Norman gets wrong may seem small from a distance – like Papal homilies, such errors would be much harder to tolerate nearer home – and he gets some ...”