“... is followed by an episode with the station manager involving mutual homosexual rape. This – it may be the rediscovered femininity, or a larger failure, including that of Australia and of giving birth to a self – sets the tone of the last part (a triptych-like plan is familiar in Mr White’s novels). ‘She was too disgusted with herself, and human ...”

“... a new father-in-law, the super-rich and reputedly horrible doctor (whose doctorate he thinks may be a mere honorific) of the book’s title. His work for the chocolate firm consists chiefly of translating – from languages he claims to have picked up during a childhood spent in France, Turkey and Paraguay. By one of the story’s few ...”

“... in which the corn negates the seed and so on, is owed directly or indirectly to him. All that may be thrown away, and only the demands of religious observance could want it kept. But along with it, logicians and their natural philosophical allies characteristically throw out an entire dimension of social, political and psychological thought: a dimension ...”

“... Nugent not heard of CASE, or the Defence of Literature and the Arts Society? The idea that there may perhaps be such a thing as a middle class gains strength when one considers lawyers. So does the idea that law is an engine of class oppression. An effective way to make it so would be for one class to run the legal system, which the middle class do. Lord ...”

“... excursions and on scores of ancient and modern bypaths besides. The reason it all works so well may be that Margaret Drabble has a well-stocked mind rather than a well-stocked notebook. She has been scrupulous in going to the best authorities on her geography-making authors, but both the pleasure and the value of her essay derive from the fact that she had ...”

“... No ordinary and direct methods of inquiry would ever reveal them. But which are they, one may ask – discovery or invention? I think that in the nature of the case we have no means of telling, and we may justifiably doubt whether this dichotomy is applicable here. The material from free association and dream ...”

“... men and women report on what one of them calls their ‘stations in life’. Some of what they say may be most revealing about what people remember and what they are prepared to say to interviewers – unhappiness tends to be disclaimed and mothers praised – and the characteristic intimacies of memoir-writing are notably absent: no one recalls their own ...”

“... affairs generally, is to be compared with yachting, and not with captaincy of a steamboat, which may be set on a fixed course to its destination and does not need to tack and change course abruptly. The destination in politics is always the same: the enduring safety and strength of the domain which is one’s own, whether principate or republic. The ...”

“... over their lips. Poisoned air stopped their lungs like a heavy stone. Fate had arrived. You may not be familiar with the lottery conducted by Fate. The winner of the lottery is granted eternal life on earth, not in the world beyond. There is a custom, sanctified to the point of law, that the winner must give Fate some item, no matter how small, to ...”

“... fact they seem to leave no doubt – that he treated human beings as mere, sheer material. You may say he had to. Why? Why, for instance, was it necessary – let’s, for once, call a theft a theft – to rob Auden (not a millionaire himself) of his commissioning fee for The Rake? ‘I have not sold La Biennale anything but my conducting and musical ...”

“... with a quarrel that occurred when the war had been going on for years. To begin at the beginning may be thought a sensible and natural way of proceeding – the Red King’s advice to Alice is still quoted with approval; and Nuttall actually calls such beginnings ‘natural’, as opposed to ‘interventionist’ or ‘formal’. Yet our culture encourages ...”

“... his mother’s desertion, when she followed her music-teacher lover from Ireland to England. This may be so, although orphans and changelings are also a mainstay of Gilbert and Sullivan, and of the popular Victorian theatre in general. Shaw was certainly sympathetic, but it seems to me that what he appreciated most was the theatrical quality of the situation ...”

“... breathed English literature from that day on. That girl was my mother, and here, now, am I ... It may be, a form of colonialism that no rebellion can mitigate, no treaty bring to an end.’ In a sense, then, Asyah is interesting as a type of cultural cross-breeding, deeply implicated in the Arabic language and in Moslem life, her close friends Egyptian. She ...”

“... once wrote that for the novelist identification with a character sometimes ‘goes so far that one may dream his dream and not ones’s own’. In my most recently published novel I decided one or other of the central characters should experience or remember a significant dream in each of seven chapters. When I tried to invent these they seemed in some ...”

“... as a partial rationalisation of the Loyalist Workers’ Strike which brought down the Executive in May 1974. That strike was directed against, and achieved the downfall of, the power-sharing Executive that had been formed by a majority of those elected democratically to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973. The failure to tackle the strike at the ...”