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“... savage gueulade he told the Goncourt brothers he felt he was going to spit blood. But why then, Michael Fried asks, is Madame Bovary positively teeming with assonances, alliterations and repetitions? How is it that after the acid bath of the gueuloir the novel is ‘shot through with precisely the sorts of phonemic effects Flaubert claimed he wished to ...”

“... succession of events that fed into one another until the final collapse. In When Life Nearly Died, Michael Benton, a palaeontologist, describes the decades of research that led to the current consensus about what happened, and argues against an extraterrestrial cause for the catastrophe. It is astonishing that scientists have acknowledged the existence of this ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. ‘Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,’ the statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, ‘knows that this is “the land of the free” … [and] the cradle of liberty.’ Cowie’s account builds on Tyler E. Stovall’s recent book White Freedom, which argued that the ...”

“... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...”

“... of the man who had harried and harassed her husband and snubbed her. The Spearses had a son, Michael, a permanent invalid, and, at this time, an undergraduate at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed at the Spears home in Berkshire. He and Michael Spears had a long talk, just ...”

“... in the form of an objective, linear chronicle, cannot turn these omissions to narrative advantage. Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying has been a successful amateur boxer and a waist-gunner in B-17s during the bombing of Germany. Later on he writes what is said to be one of the finest contemporary American poems, ‘Coming Clean’, and later still he ...”

“... saying it would do about Murdoch. Apropos the price war, I know someone who sat next to Conrad Black at dinner while it was going on. The Telegraph was one of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business ...”

“... bald cone, and soils the windows. A plangently beautiful, one-off version of Annensky called ‘Black Spring’ merits quoting in full, but I will give just five lines of it: Now the dumb, black springtime must look into the chilly eye . . . from under the mould on the roof-shingles, the liquid oatmeal of the roads, the ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

“... Letters of this date and from these regiments are notable, too, for their cryptic references to ‘black monkeys’, who seem to have been the Indian commissioned officers. Lance Dafadar Mahabat Ali Khan, another NCO, observed that ‘work in a cavalry regiment nowadays is not anything of a catch because of the harsh treatment meted out by the ...”

“... was four when World War Two began, so I followed its fortunes with the simple patriotic pride and black-and-white morality which belongs to childhood. Since my father was in the Air Force (as a musician who prudently avoided going up in an aeroplane even once), I took a special interest in that arm of the Services, became a fairly adept plane-spotter, and ...”

“... My little sister walks away from the crash, the black ice, the crushed passenger side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway a white plastic bag floating up out of the grass where the worms are working slow and blind beneath the ants that march in their single columns of grace like soldiers before they’re shipped out, before war makes them human again and scatters them across the fields and the sands, across stretchers and bodies, across the universe of smoke and ash, makes them crouch down in what’s left of a building while a tank moves up the street towards the river where it will stop, turn its engine off, the driver looking through a window smaller than an envelope, where he will sweat and think about how beautiful Kentucky is ...”

“... Mason, is particularly anxious, and his unscrupulous roust-about, Andy McKillop, who sees two black men visit Gemmy and talk with him, plays on these fears. There is a night raid. Gemmy is abducted, beaten, and only saved from drowning by Jock. He is removed to the care of a woman, Mrs Hutchence, the only one in the settlement who has a ‘real ...”