“... that wounds you, bores you or carries you away.’ In this language we may hear something of the young girl’s father, disobeyed in the letter but followed in the spirit. Who could resist the destructive and the demonic? Though I’m not sure about the clinging.Kristeva likes apparent contradictions, though hers aren’t as unruly as those we find in ...”

“... task should be so ridiculously easy: ‘One had to forget ... that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart.’ Killing is simple and hard in Nabokov: child’s play and yet ...”

“... alternatives. This third story is called ‘Pauline de S.’, and opens the collection. A young man learns that an old friend is dying, and pays her a visit. He prepares himself by imagining how she must be feeling – no, how she should be feeling – and gets things hopelessly wrong. Surely the proximity of death inverts all our ...”

“... from the blow, riddled with ambivalence as he must have been. He was helped in his recovery by a young French admirer, Françoise Laffitte-Cyon. But here, too, ironies abound. With Françoise’s help, Ellis began to come to terms with the fact that his own sexual focus did not concentrate on the act itself, but somewhere else. In some startling private ...”

“... 1952, at a meeting of the Shaw Society, he publicly relinquished work on the bibliography – and young Dan Laurence, then a college graduate assistant, stood up and announced that he would undertake the job. Thirty-one years and 15 days later it was published. Mr Laurence has been sustained over these decades, he tells us, by ‘angry determination’. What ...”

“... evoked by these evasions – which leaks through their words and their scarce silences. When the young hero of Haroun and the Sea of Stories discovers that silence, too, has ‘its own grace and beauty’, the effect is one of major shock. He had thought that silence was evil, and the rest of the story he is in points that way. The arch-enemy is the Prince ...”

“... gang killed 14 Catholics in the Millfield district of Belfast after a constable was shot. Although Michael Collins brought these killings to the attention of Winston Churchill during the London negotiations, Nixon was never arrested or charged. He became an embarrassment only when Sir James Craig and the Unionist hierarchy got involved with the Governments of ...”

“... an ordinary miracle he would never forget. Prosser describes this ‘ordinary miracle’ to the young daughter of the house he lodges in, and Jean Serjeant is at once doomed not to forget it either. She never quite makes up her mind what it is about Prosser’s tale that moves her most. Is it the twice-risen sun, or is it the heroic image of Prosser in his ...”

“... Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images ...”

“... There are the incongruities of grammar and phrase books for those tormented but still pellucid young sensibilities to struggle with. La Normandie est renommée par ses falaises et ses fromages.     What are Normandy, cliffs, cheeses and fame? Too many words on the look-out for too many meanings.     Too many syllables for the tongue to ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... debt and unemployment. Leadsom said the thing was not to create jobs but to make it easier for young people to start their own businesses. ‘The average young person is not going to start a business,’ Krugman said. You don’t have to be too clever to outwit a Tory ideologue. That day Krugman also went on the BBC’s ...”

“... Mitt Romney has now joined Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in the political void that awaits any rejected American presidential nominee who doesn’t care to linger into senatorial senescence. Dole appeared in adverts for Viagra. Dukakis has been a public transport activist. Mondale, in 2002, at the age of 74, ran an 11-day campaign for his old Minnesota Senate seat after Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash ...”

“... has faced the choice of war or peace on some ten or twelve occasions during my lifetime. I was too young to have an opinion on the outbreak of the First World War, then known as the Great War. Thereafter I assumed I should always be against war even when it was conducted in the name of collective security. I opposed going to war over Manchuria in 1932 and ...”

“... whether I’m right or wrong.’ But if you’re going to believe in angels, it seems to me (young fogey that I am), it ought to be with at least a little bit of awe. Here’s Milton, for instance, describing Michael’s heavenly forces setting out to do battle with Satan and his rebellious hordes (from Book Six of ...”