“... liberal, forgiving, anxious to promote ‘mutual understanding’. Men need to realise that women may be put off, even hurt, by aggressive male conversational style. Women need to realise that men are not intending to be unsympathetic or dominating: it is simply that the language learnt at their father’s knee may make ...”

“... in view of the fact that anti-semitism plays a virtually negligible role in Theweleit’s book. It may simply be the case that what Theweleit is describing is not a political phenomenon in the conventional sense at all: that his analysis may be equally applicable to soldiers, secret policemen and torturers of left-wing as ...”

“... any white male novelists of the highest class below pensionable age in the United States. This gap may be amply filled by genre fiction, by female, ethnic and minority-group writers – not to mention the novelists of the rest of the American continent – but the desire to announce some hitherto unknown contender to the world is readily understandable. What ...”

“... the stage goes up in flames. Loudspeakers fall, records are scattered in the mud. This last item may seem pretty minor in a context of such horror and confusion, but it is shot and situated – we see the disc jockeys eager to save their records rather than themselves – in a way that makes the records stand for much else that is scattered here and could be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pregnancy (she is 37 – much too old in Adrian’s eyes even to be thinking of having children) may have been caused by George Mole or by Lucas. Doreen Slater (‘Stick Insect’) is certainly pregnant by George Mole. By the end of the second book Adrian has witnessed his sister’s – half sister’s? – birth, a death and a cremation. He has taken his ...”

“... of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della Torre, the London correspondent of the newspaper La Repubblica. It is a labour of love. The third book is another of Cosgrave’s ...”

“... of the participants in the congress, and the ideologies which fill their heads, whatever they may be, will seem as implausibly grandiose and as deviously self-serving as those of Rhodes do today. We can also be pretty sure that whatever may have kept the delegates busy that Saturday afternoon, it had not been a visit to ...”