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“... that ‘with me everything ends in great erotic scenes, and explains that such scenes generate a sharp light which reveals the essence of the characters and their situations. Sexuality is so important in Kundera’s stories – and not least because he presents it in so unpornographic a way – that it isn’t just vulgar curiosity which makes one wish he ...”

“... than glamorous, Elizabeth’s pretensions are reduced to the vanities of an ageing queen. Sharp and subversive, the image is gritstone to the polished marble of the Elizabethan reputation. Isaac Oliver’s unfinished portrait of Elizabeth I (c.1592) Antiquaries and historians have wrestled with Elizabeth from the outset: first there was William ...”

“... A father​ is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland ...”

“... flimsiness, as imagined persons, of the chauvinists in question. Fabian Driver, the object of some sharp female rivalry in Jane and Prudence, is no advance on Hoccleve or Adam as a persuasive masculine force: his insensitivity matters less than his insubstantiality; as a village Lothario you could say that he is wittily exposed, except that there’s so little ...”

“... evidence which points to his guilt. The convention of the judicial investigation, with its short, sharp questions and its indiscreet probing of an unlikely life, is used to explore the network of clues and tell-tale incidents that is the structure of any detective story. In the end, however, the truth of the investigation, which leads to the conviction of a ...”

“... among the law lords even when they disagreed with one another to one of outspoken and occasionally sharp-tongued disagreement, especially in the high-profile cases in which a bench of seven, nine or even eleven justices has failed to reach unanimity. He describes as ‘unthinkable under the old regime’ Lord Wilson’s assertion that the interpretation of a ...”

“... conduct it needed to be published.In modern public law the value of policy as a way to blunt the sharp corners of the law without sacrificing consistency has been recognised by the courts as creating a legitimate expectation that published policies will be adhered to. But none of this constitutes an alchemy that can turn policy into law. This has ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen Schiff in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘I had to learn it. Having to learn it, I became my own man.’ And, in A Way in the World: ‘I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a ...”

“... the film seem a little more conventional than it otherwise might. Alan Rickman is the Caterpillar, Stephen Fry is the Cheshire Cat, Timothy Spall is a bloodhound who seems to have dropped in from another movie. The fun of the thing becomes a little stronger than the threat of the thing, and there is a rather dogged narrative logic to the whole structure that ...”

“... Etching a plate is very like making a drawing. A needle scratching through resist is like a sharp pen being dragged across paper. If you combine it with drypoint – scratching vigorously enough to throw up a burr – it even replicates the pressure-dependent thicks and thins of a pen-drawn line. Drypoints of night scenes by Martin Lewis exploit the ...”

“... progress in the theatre. The same rhythms are found in Stella’s own sentences, which make her sharp observations prick the more. ‘The cooker bit sounds authentic. You don’t mention fat for nothing,’ she says, in a discussion on the genuineness of a string of theatrical anecdotes. An Awfully Big Adventure is a very believable portrait of the ...”

“... a holiday diary kept in childhood, figured in the Tribute to W.H. Auden organised not long ago by Stephen Spender.) In general, the facts in the book are effectively deployed, but they are sometimes insufficient and uncertain. Mr Osborne’s, of course, was not an easy task. Like quite a few artists, Auden lived off rumour, and was the cause of rumour in ...”

“... emerging shape of Ulysses. ‘Bloom has been disproportionately on [stage] ... Where in hell is Stephen Telemachus?’ After writing the first episode of Ulysses in 1915, Joyce had described it to one correspondent as ‘a continuation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, the book about ...”

“... public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and space) were profoundly altered and extended in the thirty years before the First World War. The scope of these books is very different: one straddles the centuries; the other delves into ...”