“... numerous misses? But what would seem certain is that such effects are untranslatable. In general, John Woods’s translation seems to me a remarkable feat: he is endlessly ingenious, and has produced a marvellous range of styles to cope with the formidable range of quotations. It is no accident that the second meaning of Schmidt’s portmanteau words is so ...”

“... icecream? Is O’Leary of the Police Department on the level? (An Irish-American, he is, like John F. Kennedy, ‘not much better than ourselves’.) Who is the dame on the phone who tells the narrator to come to the Atlantic Club between six and seven: ‘And when you come, to come alone’? Why the allusions to The Tempest? As you can see, Muldoon is ...”

“... work. The book includes essays on his ‘Aunt Trix’ (Rudyard Kipling’s sister) and General John Monash, the Australian First World War hero, who had been a visitor to his mother’s house in Melbourne; it also contains an account of a long and adventurous journey in Nigeria just before the country attained its independence.* Thereafter, though he ...”

“... and subtle. It is a toss-up which are the worst papers in Philosophical Subjects. For some time, John Searle has been in the business of refuting David Hume’s thesis that purely normative or evaluative claims cannot be derived from purely factual claims. This has generated a certain amount of argument in the journals. Jaakko Hintikka is one of Searle’s ...”

“... India and parts of Ethiopia teem with marvels,’ wrote Pliny in his Natural History. ‘The Gymnosophists stay standing from sunrise to sunset, gazing at the sun with eyes unmoving, and continue all day long standing first on one foot and then on the other in the glowing sand. Megasthenes states that … there is a tribe of human beings with dogs’ heads, who wear a covering of wild beasts’ skins, whose speech is barking … Ktesias describes a tribe of men called Sciopods (Umbrella-Feet), because in the hotter weather they lie on their backs on the ground and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet ...”

“... in Professor Brooke-Rose really knows all of this. She deals incisively with the futile efforts of John Silver to explain away the governess’s knowledge of Quint’s appearance. But the allure of radical ambiguity, as a mere idea, proves too strong. In Chapter Eight the governess says, of Mrs Grose: ‘I had only to ask her how, if I had “made it up”, I ...”

“... It is hardly a new discovery that becoming a parent is full of problems. In every society there have been at least some parents who have had a huge stake in the survival of at least some of their children. However high the mortality rates of pre-modern societies, we do not know of a time when parents did not often feel acute distress and anxiety over their children’s health ...”

“... and Hassall the authorised biography in 1964 – though Delany’s bibliography puts it in 1972. John Lehmann’s sympathetic debunking biography of 1980 gets into the bibliography but not into the text. Delany’s Neo-Pagan era begins in 1907 towards the end of Brooke’s first year at Cambridge. Brooke had won a scholarship to King’s College from stuffy ...”

“... photography to her portfolio. She has never been short of professional admirers. Jean Cocteau and John Grierson are fulsome in their praise. Mick Jagger tells her he has seen some of her films 15 times. Nor, of course, does she lack detractors; the fiercest in recent years has been Susan Sontag, who traced a line of Fascist exaltation right through the ...”

“... from a married police detective to a black teenage student writing a story about the serial-killer John Wayne Gacy. This is a woman who chooses to live dangerously. In every respect – her sexual aggression, her intellectual interests, her liberated lifestyle and her feminist leanings – Frannie is the kind of transgressive woman who gets singled out for ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual conference was taking place. The effect of ...”

“... The Greeks themselves had no word for their last and most lasting literary invention. ‘Extended prose fiction’ would describe it; ‘novel’ or ‘romance’ would characterise it. Modern critics used to opt for ‘romance’, with its implication of purple sentiment out in the Mills-and-Boondocks of literature. Nowadays, we hear more about the Greek Novel, with all that implies for a place in the Great Tradition ...”

“... puzzle was that well-meaning visitors had been sousing the patients’ dressings with holy water. John Blake, a surgeon at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin, twice put off a cataract operation on a woman of 72 after she developed conjunctivitis. The woman had bought a statuette of the Madonna which was equipped with a reservoir of holy ...”

“... Peckham to Bermondsey in order to give it a more authentically working-class flavour (shades of John Major?). A generation earlier, H.G. Wells grew up in a basement kitchen with a mother as discontented as Steedman’s and Woodward’s, a mother who abandoned the domestic hearth, and forced her younger son out into the world as a draper’s apprentice the ...”

“... is more general than I had supposed, and sometimes it reaches surprising heights: this is from John Fowles’s Shipwreck: ‘No other element has such accreted layers of significance for us, such complex archetypal meaning. The sea’s moods and uses sex it. It is the great creatrix, feeder, womb and vagina, place of pleasure; the gentlest thing on ...”