“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”

“... April 1993. In the bookstall at Nice airport I notice a paperback with the title Le Chercheur d’or. It seems to be about a love affair and a search for hidden treasure at the turn of the 20th century. I have never heard of the author, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, but I buy it anyway. Two days later I put the book down ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

“... the Federal Republic (East Germany gets its place, but only a very small one; it would have been nice to see a Trabant opposite the Beetle). Clearly an exhibition illustrating the high standards of German workmanship and its contribution to European culture through the ages is going to concentrate on objects produced for the rich and powerful. But this ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... excellent’ flat she shared with Gwen Salmond and Gwen John had ‘a charming studio room and nice spots of drawings & photographs on the walls’ and ‘two … Jap prints’ bought for 2d from the bouquinistes by the Seine. ‘Gwen John is sitting before a mirror carefully posing herself,’ Ida wrote. ‘She has been at it for half an hour. It is for ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... demonstrated, the line between genuine heterodoxy and implicit irreligion is hard to draw. Even David Hume, sharpest and most sophisticated of unbelievers, is being shown to have refined his objections in the context of a variety of religious cultures, French Catholic, Huguenot, Reformed Dutch, Irish as well as Scots Presbyterian, and with a ...”

“... one’s own childhood had been just like that. One might also, more shamefully, think it quite nice to be that kind of mother. A school was not in fact found, though from time to time there were tutors; and most of Billi’s adolescence was spent – or that’s how it seems – thinking about the lives of the grown-ups around her. About her mother’s ...”

“... who write poetry of home are often aware of its dangers though they may not always avoid them. David Dabydeen’s ‘Coolie Odyssey’, dedicated ‘for Ma’, and included in Section One of the four-part ‘alternative’ anthology, The New British Poetry, opens: Now that peasantry is in vogue, Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... My own recent chance encounters with civil servants have quickly elicited the party line in five nice variants: the public questioning of civil servants and ministers was ‘quite unfair’; this was hardly the first time we had sold arms to dictators; the very setting up of the enquiry, with the powers it had, was a mistake, and ‘called into question the ...”

“... on doing so. These fictions have the elliptical urgency of notes to an intimate; they can also, as David Garnett complained in a letter quoted by Barbera and McBrien, become ‘an impenetrable dossier of private day-dreams’. Some of the incidents and arguments of her novels are treated more cogently in poems. Some of them might have been better not treated ...”

“... bird.’ Hardy, a little earlier, had offered less of a challenge to his own conventionality: ‘Nice, dried up, alert old fellow; liked him.’ Having read Sons and Lovers, he observed severely – and a trifle oddly for one who had devoted ten years to adultery – that ‘the body’s never worth while, and the sooner Lawrence recognises that the ...”

“... Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is something of the whiner in his Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, as there is in Rick Blaine’s self-pitying drunk scene in ...”

“... and his inattention drove her to an embarrassing alcoholic binge. He’s now a mortician, ‘very nice-looking in those black clothes’. Looking at Darcy the undertaker, she thinks: ‘I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.’ Munro’s retrospective technique isn’t without its score-settling. A novel in the form of interlocked ...”