“... or special than any secondary discourse about it, so that a tertiary discourse about the secondary may be undertaken without inhibition. There is no trace of the irony of Tate’s title, and a good deal of Shandean buttonholing: ‘I found it impossible to avoid sounding smug ...’ Donoghue’s sense of art as perennially subjected to biological and ...”

“... collective and the State. Oberman rejects all this as too easy a way out of a complex problem. It may well salve ‘forever the German religious conscience’, but it does violence to truth. Generalisations must wait till we know a lot more. Confessional distortions are out of fashion; some political and social ones less so. Oberman’s book is a massive ...”

“... Now they are falling to pieces. The Severn Bridge is rusting. ‘Spaghetti Junction’ may soon have to be closed altogether. I am enough of a motorist to have learnt that it is safer and quicker to travel off the motorways than on them, but one hard winter, it seems, has brought havoc even to the ordinary roads of the country. It all sounds like ...”

“... a world of face-values if not of faces – yet one where by the rules of the game any face-value may have a sinister obverse, and unexpected reversals of meaning are the one thing readers know to expect. So far so good: but in this novel the Agatha Christie reference is itself only a blind. Peter is apparently suffering from loss of memory, so that to match ...”

“... concretely enough: the question is whether the modern world is seen as presenting a crisis – it may also be an opportunity – radically different from anything in past history. Hegel and Marx, of course, took this to be so, and both associated the promise, as well as the distinctive character, of modern culture with its unparalleled degree of ...”

“... up their sentimental toying with the past, but the author is unmistakably bent on exacting it. It may be said that magnanimity can come easily to a victor. The society-building in Scott’s early fiction nevertheless seems more flexible and statesmanlike than the social visions of other creative English conservatives in the same years. Wordsworth in The ...”

“... by negligence, when the ship is taken aback. A steam-powered ship cannot suffer this fate, and few may know that the familiar expression has a nautical origin. According to Sir John Richardson, as quoted in the OED, it happens thus: ‘when through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the ...”

“... her a note that showed not one iota of what I wanted it to say, but Thank you … magical … and may I have the pleasure, etc, on New Year’s Eve? She came, her bloom irradiating my grey room. The bortsch was good, the wine was better, a candle flame danced in the draught, pirouetting when we laughed. How far that little candle … laughter … Tatyana’s ...”

“... one needs to know that these are songs of a rather peculiar kind, and that other sorts of letters may have been dropped into the pillar-box with them. Rupert was secretly engaged to Noel from August 1910 to December 1911, and often begged her to marry him; but had it come to the push, he would neither have expected nor wanted the marriage to take place. He ...”

“... with all their inter-dependencies, to promote the well-being of a nation and protect it as well as may be from the shocks of various kinds to which it will inevitably be subjected. It only has limited meaning, for instance, to say that budgets should always be balanced when a balanced budget with expenditure and taxation both running at 40 per cent of GDP ...”

“... of humour, delight in the unusual bordering at times on the perverse, combativeness of spirit: it may seem fanciful to attribute personality in this way to a magazine which outwardly appears to be just a mixed bag of essays by various hands. But giving character to a magazine is what editing is all about. If the LRB has half the character that seems to be ...”

“... kept the NKVD supplied with secret intelligence from 1941 onwards, but this keen sense of shame may have been sufficient punishment for his crimes. For Annan the treason which began the long post-war decline derived from another source. As he acknowledges, when it came to traitors such as Long, ‘the Establishment imposed a pall of silence,’ but this ...”

“... is sophisticated and complex. Certain literary works, or even a whole literary ‘tradition’ may find ways of representing such conflicting chronologies. In a sense, this is true of Wuthering Heights and of Heathcliff in particular. For both the house and the character belong definitively to the world of the realist novel, with its ...”

“... fact, did not mean very much. When, once, he wore a false nose at the dinner table, it was not, we may be fairly sure, to rebuke his guest the Marchesa Casati for wearing inch-long false eyelashes. It was merely a jape, country-house prankishness. His verbal wit, it is true, sometimes had a little more edge, in the Noël Coward style. I liked: ‘Complaining ...”

“... Justine’s foolish, ill-at-ease paramour; and Brett, L’s young and beautiful companion who may, or may not, be his lover. This cast has gathered on an unidentified island where they are awaiting some non-specific global catastrophe from whose effects money and circumstance have rendered them exempt. The book must ...”