“... cross (‘To bed very furious and tantrumical,’ ‘I was extremely gruff – unpleasant’) we may conjecture that it is her illness that is causing the page ‘to crackle with rage and frustration’. People who write about Virginia Woolf appear to be especially prone to sentimental over-interpretation of this kind, and one suspects that their heroine ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... She herself suggests that the ‘sense of displacement and vicariousness’ which she suffers from may be part of a more general condition. It certainly gives her enough motivation to convert her rehearsal of the knowable facts of Adrian’s life into an imagined re-experience of them. It gives the novel’s climax – the revelation that the guilt for ...”

“... definition of the ‘better sort’, to which national, as well as local, economic change may have contributed. Yet in Havering, as in the country, the clearest change seems to be, not a rise or fall in any class, but an increase in the numbers of gentry. Here Havering seems to caricature the national trend. In 1570 to 1590, there were 24 to 25 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that kind of Literature – which would make it more what it ought to be.’ He went on: ‘This may not seem much to read, but I mean a great deal by it in the writing.’ On receiving Lewes’s second novel, Dickens explained that the troubles he was having with rehearsals for one of his theatrical enterprises had ‘Swallowed up’ the great many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Implements in their Places (1977), this Clydeside proletarian reflected on language, on how one may utter words not to encompass known experience but to summon up experience not yet known and perhaps in the end unknowable. When in Malcolm Mooney’s Land he draws on Fridtjof Nansen’s diaries, he is building on Mallarmé, who was before him in seeing the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... museum contain the Holocaust only by labelling it ‘history’, a series of past crimes that we may now observe from a safe distance? What if we were to object that the Holocaust was not ‘history’? Should we then demand its removal from the sanitising grip of the museum? What, in short, belongs in a museum? On this side of the Atlantic, displays of ...”

“... taxonomy, though anything but new, is stated with new clarity and order. Jargon from any source may be found in one of three forms: shop talk, show talk, and sales talk. The historical passage of a word or phrase from restricted exactitude, through metaphor to common language, and then, as jargon, to a death by evacuation of meaning will he shown by the ...”

“... self-mocking and costive and excitable and trapped: – if she’s a clamped oyster that may or may not have a liking for him then he can only be a claspknife that turns into Kinch the fearful Calvinist a hard penis a hand writing with someone else’s pen before shifting to the perspective of the woman: he lies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”