“... to a lamp-post knows that, once started, they acquire a certain unstoppability. Common sense may say that they should be stopped, but nothing short of a fiasco will make that politically possible. It was fervently hoped in parts of Whitehall that the Concorde airliner would develop a technical fault somewhere along the line so that it could be declared ...”

“... phoned from a restaurant and told the silence at the other end that she would be back by ten. She may have been trying to fool her friends, but the trick was aimed at least as much at herself: it was as if she hoped her father would stop pretending to be dead and pick up the phone. Levine reveals that that night was the first time she displayed any physical ...”

“... When my father reached Paris from Russia in May 1919, the man who met them at the Gare de Lyon was Uncle Alyosha. My father was six at the time and he has no memory whatever of the tall, soldierly gentleman with a moustache. Instead his memory darts unerringly to the thing which mattered to him at that moment in his life ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... attitudes to laughter for more than fifty years, and his book is clearly a labour of love. So, he may appreciate a further example, from the Qumran scrolls outlining the regulations of the Essene community not long before the time of Christ. Members of the community were required to ‘do penance’ for particular lengths of time, depending on their ...”

“... now proclaim you rad. Arise Sir Damien.’) Wicked (‘excellent, great, wonderful’), you may notice, has avoided becoming a snappy monosyllable. It is, we are told after the definition, ‘a reversal of meaning’, which seems obvious, but dictionaries have to do what dictionaries have to do. Its history is not entirely clear to the ...”

“... to in the scales of human behaviour, rather than of poetry the verbal matter – although I may be drawn into making incidental references to it. Another way of describing my point of view, here, is to say that I am trying, here, to function in the field of human criticism rather than in that of literary criticism. (In my fundamental attitude to poetry ...”

“... that he does not expect to solve the ‘mysteries’ of his life sounds humble enough, but it may be associated with an element of insouciance in the novel which is unsettling at times. The narrative becomes increasingly episodic, and the function of such sequences as Maud’s brief career as a spiritualist remains enigmatic. The question of how she gains ...”

“... people could barely stay alive. People do not starve to death now, and, miserable though the level may be, they can get Income Support rather than having to break up stones for a bowl of gruel. We may be in a pessimistic age, and yet who could be so blinkered, after reading this book, as to deny that in terms of food ...”

“... almost to the point of nausea.) Apart from the always disconcerting question of why novelists may be utterly despised by their fellow-countrymen and revered by foreigners, this generous lack of belief in the business of literary criticism is very revealing. How right he is that what she found in the book is ultimately what matters, and how rare it is for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his back-packers all die underground in an explosion and fire that the cult leader himself may have caused. A year later, a man from Melbourne and a woman from Boston arrive in Outer Maroo looking for their lost children. They meet up with Mercy and Jess, two of the three female witnesses at the centre of the story, and give the final prod that sets ...”

“... all nobody to each other and everything to ourselves.’ Readers of David Plante’s novels may recognise this brand of solipsism, half stricken, half thrilled. It would be untrue to say that the conviction of solitariness goes untested in the course of the book, but by the end it has been vindicated at least as much as argued against. Richard’s early ...”

“... while giving no quarter to the more paranoid forms of ethnic identity. The one, Rose comments, may just be the flipside of the other: it is those who have lost the minimal conditions for identity who yearn to be falsely secure. If the Jewish people have been romanticised by some Post-Modernists as that which eludes all fixed meaning, this is hardly the way ...”

“... The Lennoxlove arguments illustrated another traditional emphasis which, irreproachable in itself, may still have a distracting effect. This is the preoccupation with the post-1746 destruction of clannic culture and Gaelic tradition: the true meaning of the calamity then has to do with the fate of Gaeldom and ‘patriarchal society’, rather than that of ...”