“... choices that might be within reach, worth a try, or even, conditionally, best. This preoccupation may have obstructed her formal attainments as a novelist, for a restless cast of mind makes conclusion difficult. Her books close in suspension, undetermined possibilities circulating in final paragraphs. Mantel’s earliest solution to this perplexity must have ...”

“... that a large war was going on for much of the time, when the intimate doings of the royal family may not have been uppermost in people’s minds. Reading the reissue of The Little Princesses, a simpler explanation for what Wilson calls the ‘cocoon of unknowability’ comes to mind. The life of the House of Windsor in the days when it wasn’t ever ...”

“... University of Southern California, and his fiction often relies on the kind of farmboy irony that may come naturally to Ross Perot, but which appears to have been institutionalised in some American creative writing programmes. In such stories, the setting is the affluent suburbs: the Mercedes is in the garage, the National Geographic is on the table, and the ...”

“... This leads us to consider a very important rhetorical figure (or ‘figure of thought’) which we may call the ‘self-excluder’. According to this figure, Sartre or Roland Barthes will heap obloquy on the ‘bourgeoisie’ while leaving quite unanswered the question of what ‘class’ they belong to themselves. The natural inference would be that they are ...”

“... hardly matters. The first version is to my mind the best, because the most ordinary. Since the man may survive or may not, which he does makes no difference to the story. (A modern narratology expert would shake his head at that.) The frostbite vs match sequence is more detailed and graphic in the first version, and two ...”

“... which other (lesser?) authors have earned themselves vast fortunes and wide readerships. Palliser may think that he can write like Jeffrey Archer, for instance, and his portrayal of a self-important politician-turned-bestseller might have a degree of rough comic vigour, but when he makes a cursory attempt at Archer’s style – in which willing nymphets are ...”

“... one both in Nato and the Community. If Michael Heseltine can stake out a distinctive position, he may even win some of the middle opinion that Mrs Thatcher never attracted and now positively repels. His European message is certainly attractive to those in all parties who voted for Britain’s entry to the Common Market eighteen years ago, and to their heirs ...”

“... but does not note the view of some medical men of the time that though their surgical death rate may have been too high, they were often, as GPs, very good diagnosticians. The voluntary hospitals were of all sizes and all qualities, and among their élite the teaching hospitals provided an additional problem of to which department the cost of their teaching ...”

“... the publicist.’ Then there is ‘the secret war’ now taking place in Salvador: ‘A secret war may be defined as a military enterprise carried out by the United States and known to its victims, international observers, humanitarian organisations, foreign journalists and the domestic radical community but, for reasons of internal collective censorship, not ...”

“... should be unmissable in the bookshops. The controversial title stands alone on the cover: who, one may wonder, is the intended reader? Perhaps a card-carrying bigot with the nerve to walk up to the counter, slap down some cash and say, ‘this is my kind of book,’ very loudly. Well, no, this is written for a post-everything kind of reader, one who requires a ...”

“... Z). What are you/ will you/ might you be doing about that?’ And then we get the ‘Jeremy, if I may say so, with the greatest possible respect, that film of yours does not begin to ...’ And so on. To which Jeremy is likely to reply: ‘Answer the question!’ But if the answer turns out to be too lengthy, or too heavily freighted with sub-clauses, the ...”

“... feels when the Chinese behave in a way he can recognise – in a way that soothes his fears. It may happen that people speak more freely to a foreigner, to someone passing through, but freedom can work against accuracy; several of the speakers in Chinese Lives express the idea – familiar to everyone who has suffered a talkative companion on a long-haul ...”

“... as its three titled parts, are dated by Oates with textbook precision between November 1944 and May 1956, taking in the chilhood and adolescence of Enid Stevick, one of four children of a second-hand furniture salesman from New York State. This history circles around crucial, scarring events in Enid’s life: the sexual abuse from her father’s brother ...”

“... twitching familiarity, are what fascinate him in his fastidious art. And – in case such analysis may make The Silence in the Garden sound too solemnly grim a work – I ought to say that the book is irradiated with not only comic moments but comic sequences, including some juxtapositions of a Church of Ireland bishop with a stotious boarding-house lady which ...”

“... back of the American century’. Libra is DeLillo’s ninth novel, his first historical novel. It may be that the discipline of fixing his imagination on a specific controlling event has been a help to him, for Libra is certainly his best book – better than White Noise, his grim, death-haunted and very funny satire on consumer society, and better than The ...”