“... The blood at the altar flows from the veins of a sinner. Once again, to talk of the scaffolding may be to miss the poem. But Curnow, son of an Anglican priest who himself trained for the ministry before yielding to doubts and the world, seldom moves far, or for long, from the traditional symbolism that partly determined his habits of mind. He ...”

“... our history’. In a sense, we always had it. As Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, ‘though you may keep a people ignorant, you cannot make them ignorant.’ Precisely what was done to the people and the roof timbers, the cattle and the ploughlands, of Sutherland and Ross, the Uists and Mull and Skye and Barra, has remained as a matter of burning fact in ...”

“... latest cultural currents has always been one of the best reasons for keeping up with her work. It may be that histories of the novel yet to be written will see this as one of the first to look back in tranquillity on the work of feminism. To look back on it, but not down on it – Cat’s Eye knows itself to be founded on what feminism has done. In the lives ...”

“... has not been easy. Our hunger for war bulletins is now absolute, and when we are satiated, there may simply be force-feeding. As this feast drags on, the Horn will be lucky if a few crumbs of coverage arc tossed its way. The Middle East has never held much solace out to Eritrea. Two of the most important protagonists in the Gulf war, Saudi Arabia and ...”

“... engage in such retaliatory actions?’ Her answer, suggestive but tantalisingly brief, is that it may have been the effect of suicide – an act of violence, Freud suggested, ‘always aimed at more than one person’. But there’s more – the surfeit, excess and plethora that seem to be so much a part of the story. Art simplifies but life really piles it ...”

“... impose, words associate, combine and bounce against each other in fresh new ways. Kelman may or may not be a scholar of Latin rhetoric, but he’s well up on all its tricks. Just look at this sentence: ‘Fucking bogging mud man a swamp, an actual swamp, it was fucking a joke’ (from ‘The Burn’). In standard ...”

“... Jones’s attempts to placate both powerful women, each of whom had reason to feel injured by him, may be construed as either diplomacy or doubletalk. On 21 January 1942 he wrote to Klein that Anna Freud was ‘a tough and indigestible morsel’ who ‘has no pioneering originality’; on the same day he wrote to Freud that Klein ‘has neither a scientific ...”

“... jets – and partly to try and build a financial and commercial empire. The turning-point was May 1982, when he was invited onto Radio Four’s Money Box to explain his so-called new wheeze, bond-washing. (Buy a gilt just after it has paid a dividend, when the price is lower, hold it until just before the next dividend is due, when the price is ...”

“... Latinist. It is possible I suppose to see this not as a problem but as the whole point, and this may be how Byatt thinks of it. The point would be, I take it, to labour in vain in order to establish that the labour is vain – that the attempt to invent Victorian fictions will invite and enable us to reflect on the impossibility of doing so; to realise that ...”

“... Mary is a constant witness to her intense irritation with Claire: Heigh ho, the Claire and the May Find something to fight about every day she wrote in her diary while Shelley was still alive. Several times in the long years after his death, she expressed in different ways her dream: ‘My idea of heaven is a world without Claire.’ But Robert Gittings ...”

“... to the Lady Chatterley trial jury about the reading-matter appropriate to wives and servants, he may have had in mind the criteria applied by a Sunday Times editor in 1949 to The Naked and the Dead. ‘No decent man could leave it lying about the house,’ the paper had exclaimed about Norman Mailer’s novel of the Pacific war, ‘or know without shame that ...”

“... in so many ways, footling, offensive, a bad, interminable joke; and sympathetic commentators may be reminded of those who dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial while feeling that it was a bad book. Frank Kermode, writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one ...”

“... SS – were 40,000. That begs a question to which I know no answer, though Malraux’s own story may provide some clues. Busy with his writing and his family, Malraux was sceptical of resistance. In 1942, following the German occupation of the southern zone, he took up residence in a large châteauferme in Corrèze, which he only left in spring 1944, after ...”

“... the left critics that the NUM was putting flesh on bones set in place by them. If the mineworkers may be described as ‘lions led by donkeys’ (in Eric Hammond’s typically emollient phrase to the Labour Party Conference in October), then the donkeys could as well retort that they at least led, and that those carping from a position well behind them were ...”

“... nowadays are concerned with the trivia of the past, and believe that it is through them that they may find deeper understanding, they ought to be interested in Napoleon, because we must know more details about his daily life than about anyone’s. We know what he liked to eat and when and how he ate; we know about his dreams and superstitions, how he behaved ...”