“... the dark, with nobody to show it you, smelling of onions and gutters.’ Some readers of this book may feel that Lady Granville’s own conversation was ‘all upon dress, the Opera, Talma’. These letters were written during the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution, but poverty, crime and social injustice simply did not impinge on her ...”

“... with potential artistic mottoes and self-descriptions: ‘stylishness starts in the heart and may, nurtured, expand outwards into fantasy, intrigue and powerful worldly gestures’; ‘a sanctuary for the delicate and fugitive, a bright glass bulwark against the brutish and drear’. One comes away from the novel remembering its heavily ...”

“... Rousseau’s Confessions with its stirring opening – ‘I am like no one else in the world. I may be no better, but at least I am different’ – modern autobiography, as a literary form has set itself the aim of recording, not so much a person who has lived through unique events, as a unique person. It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether this ...”

“... sized and angled organalia in Edward Manners’s gay bar-coded sensibility, young Luc, though he may possibly be a heterosexual (mixed blessing!), and though the thought that he is related to Jesus Christ is ‘slightly unnerving’, utterly appropriates our likeable if occasionally glum hero’s romantic imagination. Luc is no rocket scientist. ‘I could ...”

“... rest of us have to make our neuroses fit in with the world around us – a touch of reality that may trim our unreason. The rich are different from us not just because they can afford to indulge their madnesses, but because they can pay other people to sustain their nightmares. This is a practical, rather than a moral point, and not one made by Charles ...”

“... apt to droop. Dickens finishes David Copperfield uncharacteristically: ‘O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!’ It is intensely moving, but its power is ...”

“... a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains.’ While this may be apposite, and worth pointing out, it skims over the way in which contact with a dissimilar Western culture shapes, and differentiates, the colonial novelist. For Mahfouz, one suspects, writing has not simply been a business of putting Egyptian ...”

“... of Turkey. The border between Turkey and Armenia has been silent for 68 years; such a span of time may induce local forgetfulness. Groups of Armenians from the worldwide diaspora are visiting Erevan all the time, and I was lucky to make friends at the hotel with a group from Damascus: they appeared to be owners of factories in Syria, or large ...”

“... Lady Astor’s son David was his friend. Besides, Chamberlain was in power: however strongly Trott may have deplored his stance, the Prime Minister was the man he had to influence. The third reason is this: in order to be able to travel and fulfil his mission, Trott had to remain on good terms with the German Government and its embassies and consulates in the ...”

“... A Comedy’, which is (presumably) motivated by anger about current attitudes towards the NHS. I may be missing a very clever point, but the mixture of glibness and cunning with which Williams forges his rhymes seems closer to the methods of those who would destroy rather than defend the Health Service. For instance, when a lecherous consultant is made to ...”

“... a member of the Royal Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Andrei Sinyavsky may dismiss his ideas as ‘ridiculous’ and suggest that he has no significance except as a stalking-horse for the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, but the excitement generated by his musings on Russian society, and especially by his essay ‘Russophobia’ which ...”

“... of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none will do scant justice to the work of one of the most perceptive of contemporary critics. Compounding with half will please nobody. From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere ...”

“... to the miracles’ which even Shakespeare could work with so barbaric an old play. This answer may seem plausible enough (although unverifiable, without the old Hamlet): but it ignores the sophistication of the revenge play tradition (as traced in Gordon Braden’s Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition), to say nothing of its symbolic relation to ...”

“... a large loose bag into which she can pop odd pieces of narrative embroidery? Such questions may help to explain the unsatisfactoriness of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s recent novels. Or simpler explanations may be more pertinent: waning energy, for example, and the loss, or abandonment, of her real – her serious ...”

“... from the Midlands and charismatic energumen called Robert Catesby, called a meeting on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the ...”