“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... South African half of the book I cannot pronounce. Passages of untranslated Afrikaans in the text may stop many readers getting to the comparative note at the end. What Dr Norman gets wrong may seem small from a distance – like Papal homilies, such errors would be much harder to tolerate nearer home – and he gets some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... novels are more a matter of attrition, perhaps not quite beyond amendment: purgatorial, it may be, rather than infernal. When a distinguished art-historian changes tack and writes a novel, what would we expect? Some mystery about attributions, high life in a Berensonian ambience? Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life is not like that at all. It has a dual ...”

“... Around​ 150,000 Dutch Jews were living in the Netherlands when Germany invaded on 10 May 1940. Over the next five years, 107,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. After the war, only 5000 returned home, where they were often met with indifference, if not hostility. Some were presented with bills for unpaid taxes or found that their homes had been repossessed ...”

“... matters. We read fiction to fortify our psyches, and in the pleasure that that fortification may give us, temperament holds sway. We read journalism … to try to learn about the external world in which our psyches have to struggle along, and the quality we most need in our informant is some measure of trustworthiness. The Executioner’s Song ...”

“... is not demonstrable, but that it cannot without circularity be shown to be even probable. It may be that later authors have been able to make out a case for applying canons of rationality to inductive procedures, but it was rather Hume’s way to contrast rationality with what he regarded as the legitimate force of custom. One gets a very different ...”

“... 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 ...”