“... wished to stick a knife in the donor. In the first paragraphs of The Third Policeman we now may notice in a different way how the nameless narrator comments that his father ‘did not talk much’, that his father and he ‘were strangers and did not converse much ... we were all happy enough in a queer separate way.’ In another dimension we ...”

“... or amiculture, like much of his other material, presumably refers back to the critical corpus. It may be that Quentin Oates had a point when he reflected in his State of Reviewing Address at the end of last year that ‘the Spectator, in its book reviews at any rate, seems to be going downhill.’ But it has to be said that Peter Ackroyd, formerly its ...”

“... the young Wordsworth exulted, to recapture Schiller’s conviction that art and politics together may jointly shape a new humanity, we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most ...”

“... their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be coming home. ‘How do you do, I cannot talk to you ...”

“... he listed. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special ...”

“... war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like that of Munich, with ...”

“... It may be an accident of rereading that makes me want to put James Baldwin’s essays and novels together, to see The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories ...”

“... the Presidency to the Party. It was not supposed to turn out like this. Under the terms of the May Round Table agreement, Solidarity was to be legalised, and controlled elections were to take place for the 480-seat Sejm and a new 100-seat Senate. Only one-third of the Sejm seats would be open to challenge: the others would be reserved for candidates from ...”

“... does it matter that both Marcel and his creator can be tiresome, pretentious and boring. Proust may well have been conscious that he had gone on too long about Albertine, because in the new version which has come to light, deftly introduced and translated by Kilmartin, he compresses the whole episode, giving it what for him is an almost brutal concision. It ...”

“... did in 1899, that ‘there is no elementary manual of English manufacture by which a student may learn to pass an examination in sociology with the least possible trouble,’ we might as well relax: the extravagant ambition has gone, the subject is domesticated, and its adherents may safely graze. There is nevertheless ...”

“... Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at all events, there are passages in both books which have a Kafkaesque quality, chronicling as they do the doings and the passions of that vast underclass which populates Britain’s prisons. It is instructive to compare some of these ...”

“... because brashness is a necessary virtue there. He writes well, is extremely witty, and while he may or may not still be a Marxist, he certainly enjoys an opinionatedly radical cutting-edge quite sufficient to place him apart from the general run of American journalism. Moreover, he goads Americans by a scathing de haut en ...”

“... after all, is a mode modern readers (like Chaucer’s) can cope with. Fictive immediacy may short-circuit by obliterating the mysterious distance of other lives and times. The carefully invented document, on the other hand, the slightly faked and not implausibly revealing memoir, can, when rightly framed, hold moral and formal satisfactions. Such a ...”

“... British and American traditions to a rich diversity of younger poetic identities elsewhere’. It may be doubted whether ‘poetry’ is so easily dislodged in favour of ‘poetries’, but no editor is responsible for his jacket copy. Nonetheless, the jacket copy (like the accompanying publicity material) is a test of the current way of marketing poetry; and ...”

“... a dramatic rise in reported cases of anorexia and bulimia, especially among young women in the US, may wish to believe that the ever-canny actress and entrepreneur will once more set a trend. But a cautionary note is in order. As Susan Bordo suggests in Unbearable Weight, her recent study of our collective fixation on thinness – discussed here by Carol ...”