“... no longer represented. An oligarchy of aristocrats and financiers, having hijacked the Commons by means of electoral bribery and intimidation, were lining their pockets by awarding themselves government jobs, pensions, and contracts – and the newer the money, the older the corruption. Nabobs, repatriated servants of the East India Company, were buying their ...”

“... Julie Andrews kind of nun, who might just want to rip off the wimple and sing. Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s collection of 100 sonnets through the ages is heavily weighted towards poems from the 20th and 21st centuries, and also towards some occasionally groan-worthy American poems – though perhaps hearts less jaded than mine leap up at Emma ...”

“... accepted a religious settlement that was Protestant, but in many ways ambiguous – and by no means as radical as some of those she appointed to run the Church would have wished. Robert Whiting’s book assesses the impact of all these changes in the parishes. His is a study of the religion of ordinary people in Devon and Cornwall. Meticulous and ...”

“... contexts. The black humour which permeates American versions of Vietnam can also function as a means of undermining the reality of the events described: the surreal looniness of it all has been rendered so often and vividly – in books such as Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers, films such as Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket – that it has become harder ...”

“... my way – complete – for the first and I fancy last time – trial a few minutes’ – which means that Bozzy picked up a prostitute in the few yards which separated his home on the Lawn-market from the law courts in Parliament House. He began to drink again, sometimes throwing things about the house when he returned; he tried to control himself (never ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... maintained’. The implication is that a real picture of the author, like the one on the front of David Cecil’s study, would not do justice to the image that Tanner has formed of her, the geist that he requires. If we have Mrs Abington in place of Jane Austen, why not a Stendhal heroine instead of Elizabeth Bennet, so that ‘by showing the different ways ...”

“... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...”

“... to others and of others to Rome, the use and role of different languages in the Roman world, the means of acquisition of Roman citizenship. No one will read it without pleasure, or without learning something new. But it remains a collection of loosely arranged material, posing no clear questions or defining in what ways the answers might ...”

“... mean? By then, at the end of a ‘voyage inwards, perilously sustained with increasingly reduced means’, he was in a cruel situation – one quite distinct from, although perhaps contributing to, his poor mental and physical state. He had believed art to be serious. His paradigms of seriousness were literary and musical. He had made his play and won ...”

“... chase has been worth the quarry, yet all are agreed that both the alleged bad behaviour and the means of making it accountable are deeply symptomatic of the state into which America has got itself. The affair is not what it seems, however. It is not Presidential politics but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel ...”

“... all Hebrew books, claiming that ‘the perfidy of many Jews is such that they seek with diverse means to subvert our true and holy Christian faith.’ The state fined publishers, banished copies of Hebrew texts, burned yet more books on the piazza. With the Talmud banned and burned, what was left? The ghetto became a centre, instead, for the study of the ...”

“... To escape this fate, Willie must choose to yield to the matterlightblooming phenomenon, but that means accepting his separation from his father, and thus the reality of his own death. Willie is only one of the narrators of his tale, which reads less like a traditional novel than a script for screen or stage. (Spliced within the central narrative is a ...”

“... one class to another, a fellow remarked: ‘You know what Wittgenstein wrote: “what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.” ’ I recall this event from over thirty years ago with peculiar vividness. There are lots of young people for whom Wittgenstein’s simple but sculpted sentences are tremendously ...”

“... Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. He wanted to see Ireland as an enlightened, autonomous European nation-state, not as a land of saintly peasants (a few of them colourfully crazed) speaking what might seem gibberish. Ancient Ireland was in his view as dead as ...”