“... to blackmail Europeans in Arab countries since they are always breaking Islamic laws in ways which may or may not be tolerated by the authorities. When a British girl falls to her death from a balcony, at Kemp’s dodgy-alcohol party for his fellow expatriates, we are reminded of news items about similar deaths in suspicious ...”

“... in the limited sense of the person who put the words on the page.’ Abominating what we may call the ‘ET’ heresy (Extra-Textuality), our authors (or should we say abstractions?) flee the referent for the signifier, and embark upon their philological odyssey through the ‘texts’. The ‘author’, once patriarch of literary property, having ...”

“... me, but in the end he will bore me merely, I know.’ (The editorial note says that ‘Hilda’ may have been Hilda Doolittle – the poet H.D. I doubt it.) Lawrence’s answer to Forster’s question – ‘how do you know I’m not dead?’ – hasn’t survived. There is more in Forster ‘than ever comes out’, he told Russell, ‘but he is not dead ...”

“... Party officials, NKVD officers, a scatter of little people keeping their heads down as best they may. Chonkin is no wily Yossarian figure: he is an innocent, and so is his Nyurka. So, strangely enough, are some of the other characters, even among the least sympathetic. Degraded as their lives and actions are, we are made to feel that they have been caught up ...”

“... and For Launcelot Andrewes? Did F.L. Lucas really write, unremarked, that Eliot may have been indebted to something called ‘Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came’? Yes he did, actually. But the editing and printing of these books are so slovenly that, half-unjustly, one is inclined to give everybody else the benefit of the doubt. Meeting ...”

“... of sombre majesty. Yet it seems to me substantially a failure or a defeat. Some of the reasons may perhaps be glimpsed in what the novelist said to Jonathan Raban (the New Review, 1974): I believe that this charade-quality of society has been present since the 18th century. Ever since society has been so poised on the cataclysmic edges, there’s been a ...”

“... and only growing ill-health, which resulted in a tragically painful death from cancer in 1958, may have prevented him from rising higher still, perhaps to the Foreign Office. Had he lived, some surmised, he might well have been prominent in the struggle for the Tory succession in the early Sixties. It was a strange, meteoric career, the product of ...”

“... of King Bomba. The general collapse of the credibility of the Left in all its manifestations may seem to make much of what is said in these two books unnecessary. Are not the authors pushing at an open door? Is not much of what they say common knowledge or a sermon to the converted? This would be a superficial assessment. It is important that those who ...”

“... Father Rosicross, he is a sleeping giant. His stories are addressed to a woman called Moll, who may or may not exist, and at the same time to the narrator, though Moran at the end slips clean away from him. But Moran is also Master Owl, poet to a medieval chieftain, Oliver (the same Oliver, it seems, that the book is ...”

“... convictions. At many points, though, as they tell their stories to the author, the reader may feel that at another place on the tape possibly lie the untranscribed lineaments of such an account. It does not, however, surface in this book. Women’s adherence to Toryism is pursued by Campbell at two levels. First, Campbell has talked to 50 Conservative ...”

“... without any ‘uneasy sensation’. He makes a contrast, too, with writers nearer our own time who may strike us as themselves basically innocent of the horrors they dispense: writers who deal in the showmanship of the extreme without seeming in any sense to embody it. As his biography direly shows, Hamilton lived his books: even lived, in a sense, his two ...”

“... paper. The declared aim of this government is to push the country into a market economy as soon as may be. It points approvingly to the Polish ‘model’ pioneered by Leszek Balczerowicz, deputy prime minister in charge of finances in Poland’s first post-Communist government – and even brings Mr Balczerowicz over from Poland to give his blessing. In deep ...”

“... not just to Baltimore, but further, to the City. The journey they make there by train in 1906 may be cramped and occluded by a ‘green-as-poison curtain’ from the obsequious services lavished on the white passengers. Yet Joe and Violet experience it all as a dance of the most exhilarating anticipation and release, prefiguring the promise of the City ...”

“... ploughing through. And yet it can be argued that even in the present state of things the novel may be the best available instrument of ethical enquiry; that its own extraordinary variety of means equips it as our best recorder of human variety, even at a time when biography is challenging that position; and that its capacity for wit and humour and poetry ...”

“... inspiration and exemplar, but the great Carthaginian doomed his own city by his victories: Sweden may have been ruined and diminished by the Great Northern War, but at least the country survived. Brilliant commanders are not necessarily egomaniacs – neither Marlborough nor Wellington deserves the term – but in some degree they are bound to be absorbed in ...”