“... of a dedicated ferocity that make the behaviour of Jean Rhys and her companions, so deplored by John Bayley recently in these pages, look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Oh! That Imar O’Hagan, with his trained snails and his ‘fridge full of blocks of frozen vampire bats “like an airline breakfast of compressed gloves” ’. It describes a city in the ...”

“... Malcolm Rifkind were visibly at odds with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown quantity, but the opposition parties have succumbed to wishful thinking in assuming that he will be a carbon copy of his old boss. Thatcherism was always an aberration from the norm of advanced capitalism. Major may ...”

“... behaviour (particularly that of public-sector trade unions) one of these fundamental changes – John Goldthorpe argued then that the ‘phenomenon of prestige’ had ‘decomposed’ and Middlemas seems to agree. It would be unwise to reject this argument entirely: but we might equally suggest that what happened was almost inevitable in the ...”

“... was the dominant institution during slavery, and for at least a short period after emancipation. John Blessingame followed this more optimistic line of argument even further in The Slave Community, detailing a rich variety of African cultural patterns which had survived the shocks of slavery. These Conflicting learned opinions were not part of an arid debate ...”

“... Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the responses of the displaced to them. But if the war involved people in visiting new territory, it also ...”

“... In the novels of William Gibson and other writers of cyberpunk, the new SF sub-genre, in the glittery non-realism of the movies, cyberspace is crystalline and neonlit and shiny, a place of infinite depth and detail, of towers and canyons and technicolor hypergeometry, the ‘consensual hallucination shared daily by billions ... a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system ...”

“... have a line there I wrote in Africa 15 years ago,’ a friend told him; others like John Davenport and Aiken merely kept score. And yet there is perhaps nothing in it as impressive as the first page and a half, a completely orderly progression of six paragraphs, massive and thrilling and utterly well-made, until the first line of dialogue takes ...”

“... at a price of £30,250 – slightly more expensive than The English Poetry Full-Text Database. As John Sutherland observed in his review of the EPFTD (LRB, 9 June), hitherto undetected plagiarisms can now be detected. The pleasant irony in Migne’s case is that his own plagiarisms are even more likely to pass unnoticed. Migne comes with an extra free ...”

“... Accompanied by a growing pile of political books, I spent most of September and half of October travelling from pillar to post and from party conference to party conference – from Blackpool to Torquay to Dundee to Bournemouth and back to where we began in Blackpool. For years now I have set out on this dismal pilgrimage filled with hope and health and holiday sun, only to return filled with alcohol, tobacco fumes and hot air ...”

“... pair, failing to make any conclusion of a courtship on a park bench, and it was denounced by John Osborne for being pointless. Days Spent in the Trees was about a greedy, possessive mother doting on her son – but what was Duras driving at? Harold Hobson found an abstract idea in it, the idea of ‘indulgence’, and other theatre reviewers followed his ...”

“... Hutt’s book should be set in the context of other recent publications. The second volume of John Ehrman’s monumental biography of Pitt gives him the appearance of a first-rate ship of the line lumbering into action, a little slow perhaps, not very good at beating against the wind, but a majestic fighting machine all the same. This is not the ...”

“... the popular Western argument that intervention to promote democracy is justifiable, accepting John Stuart Mill’s dictum that freedom can only be won from within. But there is, Walzer insists, a right to intervene in order to counter the illegitimate intervention of another power, and there is a right as well to intervene on behalf of forces fighting for ...”

“... period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his Wrath as far as America. Frith’s Derby Day even reached Australia. Hyperbolic publicity was circulated which boasted of the time consumed in making these pictures, the painstaking search for ‘authenticity’, the number of ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... and drifted into the writing of guidebooks for the expanding railway age. His first publisher was John Murray the third, who wanted an anonymous Handbook on Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire and insisted on facts, not fancies. Hare regretfully accepted this limitation. Much of his early travelling was done with Maria, by now a prey to hysterical trances. When he ...”