“... clothes. So, as the blurb explains, there is ‘a second, subversive message. “Bad” women may get their comeuppance in the final scenes, but the bulk of the film shows them enjoying careers, sex, mink and jewels.’ Basinger points out the amazing importance of fashion in these films: actresses had to wear a different costume for every scene, and in ...”

“... something of a conventional piety among Irish middle-class liberals at home and abroad. The novel may end on a note of nostalgia for the high hopes of a long-buried era, but it found precious little to approve in that epoch when it was examining it a few hundred pages earlier. Rita’s husband is an identikit revolutionary zealot, conveniently two-dimensional ...”

“... reading if it contained this episode alone. The last chapter, ‘Carbon’, sets forth what we may call the author’s philosophy or way of looking at the world, and acts as justification and framework for the somewhat uneven material which has preceded it. I should mention that, tucked in between the chronologically-ordered chapters of the life-history ...”

“... by outnumbering them. All the same, even if a way of life based exclusively upon the potato may be richer than Sir Charles Trevelyan suggests, when the root fails, all is lost. It is estimated that up to a million people died, either from starvation or from disease that came in the Famine’s wake. Emigration, to the United Status and also to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to need such things in order to survive, and they are apt to develop a life of their own which may be as important as electoral or ministerial history. The election landslide of 1945 has (not surprisingly) been a constant source of inspiration and refreshment to leaders and rank and file alike in the subsequent generation. Either as a latterday St ...”

“... and a multitude of cross-references. His book lacks a clear chronological structure. This may have been necessary to achieve his purposes, but it demands continuous sympathetic concentration from his readers. I suspect that not all of them will be prepared to grant him this. But no one could fail to be impressed by the many shafts of light which are ...”

“... to present, the picture of a cool, dispassionate and largely uncommitted observer. Mr Mortimer may see himself in this light, but few other people will so see him. For someone like him, it would have taken quite a feat of dissembling to achieve this result. A new party game could be played to determine which literary figures, living and past, could be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the knowledge of flowers and herbs, and ritual surgery. The regime is strict. The dance mistress may use shock techniques on novices, waking them in the middle of the night and ordering them to dance, or forcing them to stay awake for two days and nights, dancing all the time. It’s tough, but not as tough as being a Mende child. Mende children have such a ...”

“... but Kafka. Reviewing the South African writer Alex La Guma in the Edinburgh Review last May, Kelman called Kafka ‘the greatest realist in literary art of the 20th century. His work is a continual struggle with the daily facts of existence for ordinary people. Kafka’s stories concern the deprivation suffered by ordinary people ... whose daily ...”

“... an interest in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of reusable art, and much of London’s Olympic stuff may well end up in Rio in 2016. The biggest building on the site is the media centre, a giant white hangar that will house more than 20,000 accredited journalists. It looks like the Pompidou, with exposed cooling pipes wrapping the building and, inside, a ...”