“... circus-masters developed a habit of giving to ordinary dwarfs the name of Lilliputians). Captain John Biddel, who brought Gulliver back from Lilliput in his ship, was apparently not so scrupulous as Gulliver. According to T.H. White, he brought away quantities of Blefuscan and Lilliputian people for exhibition ‘among the Fair Grounds of the Kingdom’, but ...”

“... Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards and ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”

“... Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the company of an American academic couple, the Vogelers, who are dispirited by the climate and by ...”

“... to that of an analyst to his patients: cultivated negative capability. But negative capability, as John Bayley has frequently pointed out, cannot, by definition, be cultivated. Absence consciously striven for becomes conspicuous. A Late Divorce has no controlling narrator, but Yehoshua is present on every page of it: as the man performing the vanishing ...”

“... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...”

“... cared about the play. It was Dead-eye Dick, tormented by guilt in Midland City, who had found old John Fortune’s quite pointless death in Katmandu, as far away from his hometown as possible, somehow magnificent. Would we have a novel, then, if there were no authorial guilt to be discharged? The question is a blunt one, and yet it gains in significance if ...”

“... The common reader may feel inclined to lay the same embargo on his writers as the Duke in the Elizabethan tragedy on his courtiers. Great tact, and a sustained intellectual animation to balance the much that is repulsive in the theme, were needed to make a very long book about it as attractive, as well as instructive, as this one is. It is a study of birth as well as death, and among what it shows perishing, besides human victims deserving or undeserving of their fate, are gangrened beliefs and ossified customs, leaving room for a fresher air to blow in ...”

“... identity distinct from the British, the very fathers of the Republic themselves – Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson – conceived of themselves, at least up to 1776, as Englishmen who happened to live overseas. How could they have thought otherwise? From these pages there rises a weird yearning. Davie, in his modern self-exile, joins in his ...”

“... Hull and Gertrude Atherton. She is wasting a lot of her time and too much of ours trying to be John O’Hara. At the slightest surge of congested blood between her primly pressed together thighs, all Mrs Krantz’s carefully garnered social detail gives way to eyes like twin dark stars, mouths like moist fruit and breasts quivering with indignation. There ...”

“... who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented friend, John Mackintosh: he did not like talk of ‘alternative policies’ from the left of the party, but he knew and loved the party and would have stayed to fight within it had he lived. The party in Parliament elects Michael Foot leader as a political response to ...”

“... J.P. Gell was dispatched in 1839 to start up the interdenominational Christ’s College at Hobart; John Buckland followed in 1846 to be headmaster of the Hutchins School. In his uncertainties over employment Clough kept open the antipodean possibility, making an unsuccessful application for a chair of Classics at Sydney in 1851. J.A. Froude, after the ritual ...”

“... very much from the male point of view (which has been stringently and definitively criticised in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing). For a woman, beauty must often be a more alienating and tainted gift than it appears to her admirers. Susan Sontag has complained that in our culture beauty, defined as ‘woman’s business’, has been made ‘the theatre of ...”

“... Opera or The School for Scandal from this reckoning. The tone is likewise snooty towards John Rich: we must hope that the fuller knowledge of Covent Garden practice which is beginning to emerge will permit less condescending treatment. It should be said that Nicoll is good, though brief, on Garrick as director, at a time when London companies ...”

“... to ‘a monkey house at feeding time’. It was in the same year, 1951, Deane tells us, that John Montague, also writing in The Bell, called for an end to the apathy which seemed the predominant feeling about cultural matters, and at the same time ‘demanded of his generation that it reflect Catholicism as a living force in Irish life’. His ...”