“... little poorly-paid work remains. Pressure builds up, and though no one as yet admits an explosion may come, Labour politicians are not slow to issue grave warnings about social consequences. Could it happen? A one-party dictatorship? Urban guerrillas? The possessed and the dispossessed fighting it out in a banana monarchy? Marcia confines herself, in this ...”

“... was craggy, formidable, his conversation a further outlet for his aggressiveness. While he may not have talked for victory, it is said that his verbal tirades were a faithful copy of the way he wrote. Ruskin had all the social graces, as well as a fine-honed aesthetic sense which Carlyle totally lacked. ‘Airt, airt, what is it all about?’ he once ...”

“... World 3. This is also acceptable, provided we are careful. The concept of falsification (World 3) may influence the way I think about an experiment (World 2), and this in turn may influence which instruments are connected in what ways (World 1). But in that last sentence, the ‘concept of falsification’ which influences ...”

“... is always found to be (weak copulative) about (weaker preposition) something. Half-baked analysis may cry out for ‘Themes’, but creators who know different shouldn’t go along with this reduction. Shame is a shorter and rather more linear narrative than Midnight’s Children. The earlier novel confronted the history of the subcontinent, but its ...”

“... theories about Australia. Some say that it is a form of cell-block Cockney, that the Kray brothers may even now be stammering their parole appeals in infant Oz. Others contend that it must be to do with the weather: that early Australians who settled some thousand miles from each other, with no contact, and from quite different racial stocks, all began ...”

“... of The Twenties and The Thirties – Wilson’s notebooks and diaries for those decades – may have done something to further this end. Wilson had done some of the preparation for their publication before his death in 1972. The Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty ...”

“... Antiphon did not expect his audience seriously to believe what he was saying. But that audience may well have included Athenian citizens who were convinced that the city was endangered because the Eleusinian mysteries had been profaned by a drunken mob, and the herms (the ithyphallic pillars that guarded the entry to houses) had been mutilated. For some ...”

“... the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi (enamoured of silkworms, one of Sebald’s preoccupations). It may have been – Sebald imagines – that the Dowager Empress cancelled the order for the miniature court train intended for Kuang-hsu when the latter was bold enough to oppose her views. (Historically, this falling out happened in the late 1890s.) And thence to ...”

“... left-wing opinion. Bagshaw’s situation is in some degree that of all intellectuals. Enthusiasm may die, but sheer professional interest mercifully remains. I thought of Bagshaw when reading Frank Kermode’s lively little book History and Value, and I thought of him again while enjoying Richard Cobb’s Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have ...”

“... with an Order of 1940 was last used in February of 1951, by the Attlee Government. All this may be familiar and even obvious. But it is not seen as quite so obvious by David Marquand, whose newly-published The Unprincipled Society* tells the history of 20th-century Britain in terms of the rise and fall of a ‘Keynesian’ consensus in which, for a few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”