“... gold tooling, an Oxford Book of Rugger Songs or of Poems about Pets – but just wait: the time may come. Meanwhile, let us be thankful that a volume as serious, innovatory, large in its scope and meticulously edited as Charles Tomlinson’s Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation can still be considered a marketable commodity. This cannot have been an ...”

“... and others. He has been called the father of the anti-novel, and strictly in terms of time this may be true, although his experiments do not range as widely as those of Robbe-Grillet. In The Connecting Door and Two Moons past and present co-exist, at times confusingly, but there is little of the delight in playing games with himself and with the reader that ...”

“... money’ and ‘the Wilson years’, and concludes with chapters – to which the whole survey may be said to be steered – on ‘Thatcher’s honoured industrialists’ and ‘Thatcher’s political honours’. It is nonsense to claim, as the publisher does, that Walker has conducted a ‘full investigation into the workings of the honours system’. The ...”

“... the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller class consists mainly of those in the creative arts whose careers stickily attract phrases like ‘he never married, being a homosexual,’ ‘not always faithful’, ‘his amorous ...”

“... restricting pornography (and, equally, public sexual activity and so on), or else there may be such legislation, but it should not be based on people’s objections to those things. Dworkin in fact escapes from this dilemma, because he does not think that people’s moral opinions, and the reactions freighted with those opinions, should never figure ...”

“... and he never quite made it as a singer). All of this is enjoyable in its way, and the book may well be read more for what it says about the author (amused by his own narcissism) and about his enemies (‘talentless louts’ etc) than for what is to be discovered concerning the Arts Council and especially the defunct Literature Department. It would be ...”

“... was ‘secretive about her own life because it afforded little satisfaction’. Her argument may not be perfect – unhappiness doesn’t on the whole guarantee silence – but she does provide grounds for discontent and misery which are not apparent from the steady calmness of much of Flora Thompson’s writing. Her father, who in Lark Rise teaches his ...”

“... coming years. It is useful to list these measures, all taken or announced in the four months from May to August 1979, not so much in order to add to the predictable groans of vice-chancellors, students and university staffs, as to wonder what it is that the new conservatism seems to mean which is so fashionable a subject in the salons of London (and of other ...”

“... Kool-Aid had been poured, darkened perceptibly’. That the artist’s wholly conscious intention may well be realised in a passage like this doesn’t matter in the least: we still wince, finding the repellent cuteness quite untransmuted. Though Jeffrey’s solemn pedantry is the source of much of this excess, it also contributes moments of startling ...”

“... and exotic beliefs are commonplace. Puck and his meinie can walk without fear of mocking. And so may the critic. The author and readers of Watership Down have no sense of being caught stooping. What diverts is Tolkein’s ‘arresting strangeness’ of the art of the storyteller. Nowhere is this more clear than in the work of Alan Garner, whose imagination ...”

“... elliptical narratives that once would have been told at far greater length. Aesthetically, this may be a gain. Such a contracted form must preserve the strongest flavours, the crises of passion, sensation, eccentricity or pathos; what gets left out is the mashed potatoes of descriptive realism. But seen as a social phenomenon, which it also is, the novel so ...”

“... there are mysteries addressed directly to the reader: mysteries not meant to be solved. The reader may well find allegory of this kind a bit of a disappointment. Talbot, for instance, alludes to the name of the ship while never actually revealing it: ‘I looked over her monstrous figurehead, emblem of her name and which our people as is their custom have ...”

“... new Gregorian chants’. Burgess never misses a trick: would he had missed a thousand. God may or may not be mocked, but words certainly aren’t. Play with them overmuch, and they turn sour and take their revenge. So Burgess is too clever for his own good? That is the sort of accusation made by people who really ...”

“... For the novelist, experimentation is both demanding and risky, in that his whole enterprise may go haywire and prove unsaleable. The short-story writer is enabled, whether by subsidisation or merely by the brevity of the form or by both, to experiment without commitment. This would be fair enough if the unsuccessful experiments were scrapped. But ...”

“... conclusions and often turgid formulations made him an easy victim. The present-day reader may in fact find Mill’s relentless verbal bullying of Hamilton distasteful. So that it is important to remember that the kind of treatment which Mill meted out to Hamilton had been meted out by Hamilton himself to an earlier holder of the Edinburgh ...”