“... the presentation of the work approaches the borderline of mendacity. In these circumstances we may well ask: was the book worth writing? Fortunately, the answer is yes and for two reasons. First, because there is in the Soane Museum a mass of unpublished and rarely seen material relating to the founder’s early years. Not, indeed, as much as one would ...”

“... they were more likely than plays and operas to be by, as well as partly about, women. Ms Peters may be right in surmising that the £200-a-week Irving paid Ellen Terry in the Nineties ‘probably made her, with the exception of the Queen, England’s highest-paid woman’, but my guess is that, if there is a contestant, she was a novelist. Marie ...”

“... This would seem to be justification enough for Stern’s general remarks. But the actual letter may not quite bear out his interpretation. Kafka writes: He [the rabbi] inspects everything, but especially the buildings; the most obscure trivialities interest him. He asks questions, points out all sorts of things. His whole demeanour is marked by admiration ...”

“... given by the Palmerstons. Everyone knew whom Disraeli meant when he said in a public speech in May 1858: ‘Leading organs of the press are now place hunters of the Cabal, and the once stern guardians of popular rights simper in the enervating atmosphere of gilded saloons.’ But Disraeli never believed in permanent enmities – nor, for that matter, in ...”

“... pioneers mole down into the earth to find a place to weather out the days, weeks, even years that may well, but for these, kill off our race. Considering their fear it’s maybe kinder when they burrow in the ground like gophers do not to offer them the sobering reminder that rattlesnakes use gopher burrows too. However layered with rocks and earth the ...”

“... will bring all this to an end, there comes instead the slam of darkness, silence, solitude. It may be for minutes only, as I have said, that I am safe; it may be for days and nights on end. Empty days, empty nights. Anyone looking at me would think that I am completely comatose, even lifeless, a rag, nothing more than a ...”

“... Continental men perform on meeting and parting. British men kiss women, they kiss children, they may even kiss their dogs, but they do not kiss each other. And if anyone disagrees, let him write and tell us when he last kissed another man and kissed him tenderly. To say that Puig’s deepest concern in Kiss of the Spider Woman is to argue for tenderness is ...”

“... Room ‘carefully composed and grandly furnished’, with the door always left open so that all may see the whisky set, the sherry decanter and glasses, the cocktail-shaker, the three smokers’ stands, all of them wedding presents whose display is obligatory but which, since the Malouf parents don’t drink or smoke, are meant as ‘a warning, richly ...”

“... Commons: ‘We were the first people to govern ourselves through responsible representatives. We may be the last. The institution is so peculiarly English, has been so envied by other nations ... that the world has come to accept parliamentary government as a symbol of freedom.’ It was all splendidly ironic. For here was Namier, the great proponent of the ...”

“... breasts sticking out to here. Fascinating as these speculations are, at least to me, they may appear to stray beyond the limits of a review of this book. (I also regard oral sex, made fashionably respectable in the Sixties by Updike and Roth, as a compromise with unadmitted homosexual drives – remember Mordecai Richler’s hero, dreaming on his bed ...”

“... the ultimate astonisher’. Plots, endings, opinions develop purposes of their own, which may reduce the confusions of life without explaining them, and it is the ‘hilariously expostulating narrative voice’ – the voice of men and novels, of sequence and logic, a voice she responded to and knew how to use – which Dorothy Richardson set out to ...”

“... an inadequate destination for a novel on this scale. A novel from East Germany, whatever else it may be, is necessarily read as a report: and for the great majority of Westerners, a report on a virtually unknown world. Judged by internal evidence, Stefan Heym’s Collin makes a strong impression of authenticity. It has been hailed in West Germany as the best ...”

“... impose a preconceived pattern on such parts of the evidence as he chooses to examine. Procrustes may have had a tidy mind, but one has doubts about his methodology. On all of these counts Roger Magraw’s book invites serious reservations. He is not much interested in events. His treatment of the 1830 revolution is typical. ‘In July 1830 three days of ...”

“... the riddle. Without it, you would presumably be unaware of its existence in others; with it, you may wonder about the purpose it serves, and how it could have evolved, and about the mechanisms of the brain that give rise to it. You may even wonder about how it is logically possible for you to be aware that you are aware ...”

“... But a writer of even the most austere narrative cannot escape Droysen’s doctrine, much as many may pretend otherwise. Thus no one will be able to write an acceptable history of the Roman Republic without incorporating into the narrative Hopkins’s findings about the nature and limits of aristocratic continuity, and therefore shifting Cicero’s boast of ...”