“... and the reasons for their involvement in the Spanish Civil War’ (the other two writers are John Cornford and Julian Bell, the subjects of Journey to the Frontier). This is ingenious, but not convincing: the book reads like what it obviously is, a piece of an abandoned project, a part of an unwritable life. Once more, there is no indication of any help ...”

“... the sentence ‘unacceptable’ to speakers of the language. For example, in the sentence ‘John loves Mary,’ ‘loves’ may be replaced by ‘hates’ or ‘eats’, but not by ‘but’, ‘thinks that’ or ‘swims’. Now consider another example, discussed at length by Barthes in his Eléments de Sémiologie, the example of the menu. A man ...”

“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... number of contributors to the Stachura collection have valuable points to make along these lines. John Conway offers a sensitive account of the German Churches after 1918, showing how they were unwilling and unprepared to meet the challenge posed by the republic, and came to see Hitler as a bulwark against Communism and as a national saviour. Dick Geary ...”

“... Eventful Years in Paraguay and Edward East wick’s Venezuela; also – a fact first announced by John Halverson and Ian Watt – that the ‘life story of an American seaman’ which Conrad claimed to have found on a second-hand bookstall and to have helped him to find his plot, was On Many Seas by Frederick Benton Williams. This latter identification is ...”

“... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...”

“... the traitors. Perhaps the most memorable story of all is that of the woman at the meeting held by John Kensit, the Protestant reformer, as he considered himself, or ‘rabble-rouser’, as Dame Rebecca calls him – all too accurately, as he was later killed in a riot of his own provoking. At question-time the woman rose very diffidently to ask a sincere and ...”

“... not dictated by the needs and resources of a local economy. Some thirteen years ago I watched Sir John Habakkuk at a conference sketch out on the board how a drop in the average age of marriage in 1740 of two years, maintained throughout the rest of the century, would explain the whole expansion of 18th-century population in England: but everyone agreed that ...”

“... epilepsy or Sartrean ‘false death’, according to your terminology and interpretation; John Bayley has wittily suggested a new one – namely, a good piece of acting), then genius. How to explain what Sartre calls ‘this scandalous occurrence: an idiot who becomes a genius?’ And how, a fortiori, to explain it when the documentary evidence is ...”

“... been done already, only much better, by King Vidor in a motion picture called The Big Parade, with John Gilbert as the son who returns to mother from war a mutilated man. The movie was made in 1925 and it was straight fiction. Now Garcia Marquez tells it again but as news from the Falklands front. Blind soldiers who phone unknowing mama only to learn of her ...”

“... of Mount Desert Island and about its history, from Champlain who named it in the 17th century to John D. Rockefeller, but he still can’t accept it as a real place. When she talks of her friends, he asks: ‘Do they come even to a place as out-of-the-way as this?’ As if exasperated, she replies: ‘Let’s not rehash the myth of my solitude yet ...”

“... brief late letters, which come sandwiched between a chatty domestic bulletin and a letter to Sir John Wolfenden about a BBC radio talk, is compounded by their common recall of Forster’s time in Alexandria, where he spent the First World War in a quasi-military capacity working for the Red Cross. Each records the surprising re-emergence of something long ...”

“... contenders would still be left in the field with no way of making a case for one over another. John Rawls’s conception in A Theory of Justice of a ‘veil of ignorance’, blotting out all information that is (according to Rawls) morally irrelevant, would be one construction, but an inherently controversial one. The upshot is that rational argument comes ...”

“... their own being, if they would only look. The message about work resembles the one discussed in John McVeagh’s memorable article on ‘Defoe and the Romance of Trade’ – that there is a glory in trade. ‘Challenging, lucrative’, trade ‘is also wonderful’, and Defoe’s admiration for it ‘is not the dull astonishment of the outsider. It is the ...”

“... and is probably the greatest novelty. In some respects it is a very odd compilation. Back in 1960 John Russell Brown wrote an article, celebrated in the trade, in which he argued against the value of old-spelling Shakespeare, saying among other things that the amount of ‘silent alteration’ an editor would have to introduce would make such a text almost ...”