“... 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 ...”

“... is known to us all in a general way. Nor can we say that the huge armaments still in being may not yet threaten our future. We are only just pulling away from the abyss and there is still much need of cool and careful thought as well as full information about the nuclear issue and its origins. David Holloway explains that ‘the central theme of this ...”

“... conventionally permitted? His great fear is that he will have to settle for the possible, which may not be much. Sabbath is 64, and he thinks his sexual end is nigh. Sex is an obsession and a principle with him, an instrument of perpetual misrule. He’s even more tiresome about erections and insertions and emissions than Portnoy was, and the book gets ...”

“... Anne Doody’s book is well over three hundred thousand words and loaded with learning, which may appal the fainthearted, but they should take into account that throughout its length it is written with verve and wit, and is by any standard an extraordinary and idiosyncratic achievement. The closest comparison available is with Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of them were something other, or more, than the bird-and-weather writers their readers knew. In May 1914 Thomas tells Frost that he ought to get started on a book about speech and literature, ‘or you will find me mistaking your ideas for mine and doing it myself’. He has been reading Frost’s North of Boston, abstemiously, only one poem an evening, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between ancient and modern in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) may owe something to the stinking Lanchester: or, rather, to the idée fixe of velocity it embodied. In October 1901, in a letter full of warm and discerning praise for Kim (1901), James had advised Kipling to ‘chuck public affairs, which are an ignoble ...”

“... art and literature are ‘social actions ... embedded in systems of public signification’; which may seem limiting. In fact, the chapter is very worthwhile, and certainly a lot more fun than Black’s wooden piece on ‘Literature, Art and Thought’. Williams starts with the ‘social context’, here meaning literacy, the language, printing, schooling and ...”

“... On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won against the odds. His beginnings were humble, if respectable, and he had progressed by virtue of hard work. He had published brilliant papers on the geological structure of Corsica, which had eventually earned him the respect of a distinguished sponsor, Professor Termier at the Ecole des Mines in Paris ...”

“... called Zoltán Pataki. Pataki still adores her. He worries that her accustomed standard of luxury may drop with a husband as practically incompetent as Mihály, so he writes to him offering a monthly cheque. But the lovely, elegant, worldly Erzsi is competent herself; she is the one who manages the traveller’s cheques, tickets and passports on the ...”

“... otherwise have been allowed to join the Union. I didn’t mind the question, though. Mormons may no longer be subject to extermination in Missouri (that legislation was rescinded in 1976), but the eleven million Latter-Day Saints – a little under half live in the US – are generally thought to be peculiar, when they are thought of at all. The Church ...”

“... them, though, especially on business trips to visit dealers and view sales, where I learn what may ‘b.i.’ (that is, be bought in), what was ‘burned’ (put up for sale and not bought, thereby having its reputation tarnished), what rumour has been started by a vendor’s restorer, what the decorators will bid up, what a runner has found, and the ...”

“... it; and yet she has a thirst for the use of the tongue, and he to yawn with a crony; and they may converse, they’re not aware of it, more than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon as possible she’s away to the ladies and he puts on his Club. The resemblances between Meredith’s portrayal of wall-to-wall boredom and Davey’s chapters on ...”

“... Hamish Malahide, a student of Gödel and Heisenberg who takes a more sanguine view: ‘There may be uncertainties but don’t you think it’s better to live in the full knowledge of this than go on looking for illusory “truths” that can never exist?’ Whatever the tenor, though, the song remains the same. Boyd’s books are rambling, lucid, genial ...”