“... trials of faith they had endured. La Milagrosa, otherwise Amelia Goyra, died in childbirth on 3 May 1901. Her baby also perished and mother and child were buried side by side. When the coffin was subsequently opened, Señora Goyra was discovered cradling the infant in her arms, or so the story goes. At any rate, she is petitioned by Cubans in need of help ...”

“... them bare.’ The consequence is that, in these brief and distilled stories, the slightest gesture may have its effect. Nor can one predict where this effect will be made or the emphasis fall: it may be in some detail of the narrative, or equally in some fleeting moralising comment. How strange and altogether characteristic ...”

“... be something that each society discovers for itself. As a result, nobody just dies. The icy hand may descend everywhere and indiscriminately, but it does so in specific cultural and historical contexts. In all communities, a high degree of political and economic mediation invariably attends the event which is usually also intensely ritualised. The result, as ...”

“... nation listen to stuff that has descended to this low level.’ ‘Students,’ he wrote on 5 May 1944, ‘are being hunted down for labour. University students are transporting earth in civil engineering projects and are loading and unloading commodities ... The special characteristic of wartime Japan is not to think about either scholarship or the ...”

“... for Jim always advanced me some money for rent or helped out financially in other ways.’ Keeler may or may not have been the most moral woman of the 1960s (my vote would go to Elizabeth Taylor for her belief in the sacred bond of marriages), but the looseness of her definitions is problematical for someone claiming to ...”

“... a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure. Bech is a strange antitype, a funhouse distortion, of his inventor. He is Jewish and ...”

“... Man (1888) that the Nouvelle Athènes had been his substitute for Oxford and Cambridge, and he may have picked up his education in Parisian cafés and salons, ballrooms and bar-rooms, but there was an accompanying loss. He had an aversion to systematic education, claiming that scholarship left the essential mysteries of art untouched, but his refusal or ...”

“... lead to the unfolding of truth but to a collision of different realities, each one of which may hold a certain emotional, linguistic or even logical validity. Faced with that paradox, why not indulge in a little stylistic flourish? This simple but occasionally unpalatable awareness, with its patina of watered down Post-Modernism, was central to ...”

“... else lurking behind it. The Jarrow marchers were nearing London. ‘The Bill’s main targets may have been the Fascists, but it would never have reached Parliament as a legislative proposal had not the anti-Fascists asserted themselves in typical fashion at a peculiarly opportune time.’ The ‘dreaded unemployed marchers’ were also therefore in the ...”

“... contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust. How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question. Not to be ...”

“... Proust’ when ‘barely out of nursery’, while also prompting the suspicion that they may only ever have pretended to leave it (the nursery I mean). The photograph also illustrates the Oriental aspect of their faces, which was pronounced in their military father, who was known as ‘Puffadder’. This was the legacy of a Malaysian ...”

“... sea, encounters, on the one hand, ocean conditions, the vast Pacific swell underlying whatever may be the disturbances brought by local weather or current, and on the other, the extreme turbulence of water in narrow gorges, of deadly whirlpools in straits. There are huge submerged logs that would tear the boat asunder, and whales suddenly surfacing, with ...”

“... son of politics. Although from age to age the nature of the bond joining parent and offspring may vary, the connecting tissue itself remains indissoluble. To fancy otherwise – speculating about one without realistically accounting for the other – is to disregard all of recorded history. Yet a remarkable number of writers persist in trying. To be ...”

“... judge in his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Richard May. He has also, through fierce determination and cross-examination, exposed the fact that the case against him is less solid than it appeared. Command responsibility – the ordering of a crime, or the failure to stop a crime that a commander knows or should ...”

“... the Whitney, with a note stating: ‘Since I took the trouble of having a photostat made of it, it may indicate that I am not so modest as I am said to be.’ Writing to Flexner himself, Hopper dismissed the interpretation and told the astonished critic that the painting depicted ‘a tuberculosis sanatorium’. The Hoppers had read The Magic Mountain with ...”