“... Chinese equivalent of boomers, the shrewdest performers now cater to a new cohort: urban, educated young women. Deyun Club, led by the old-school performer Guo Degang, still functions as comedy did in feudal times (all-male cast, master/apprentice system, absolute hierarchy etc), but tickets for its live shows are sought after. The fans are enthusiastic and ...”

“... with the exception of the angelic figure in the curious drawing known as The Dreamer. A naked young man sprawls dreamily. In the air above there hovers – upside down, almost vertical, wings spread – a smaller and rather chubby naked figure, blowing a trumpet downwards in the direction of the sprawler’s ear. The overt iconography, Dr Liebert ...”

“... David Storey’s new novel begins with a brief prelude reminiscent of The Rainbow’s, tracing the historical mutations of a locality from its natural to its urban (here 1930s) condition. The theme of the novel has other evident similarities with Sons and Lovers. Both deal with the emergence of artistic talent from working-class fetters ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in ...”

“... In a preliminary chapter called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ David Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page ...”

“... the Oslo Accord suggest that much the same sort of thing was said there, while leaks from the Camp David summit in 2000 describe similar exchanges between Clinton, Barak and Arafat. In fact, the Israeli tone and attitude have barely changed since British despair led to the Palestine question being transferred to the UN at the end of the Second World War. The ...”

“... specialisation within it of the kind taken for granted here has become impracticable, and any young practitioner of the subject is almost routinely (and quite legitimately) expected to span the story of both the British at home and the British diaspora. In addition, investigating the British imperial past is widely viewed as useful for the present of the ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... a job with the British-run Egyptian postal service, and Nelly Grün, a cultured and attractive young woman from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews. Nelly was visiting her uncle as a reward for graduating from high school, ‘still a fairly unusual achievement for girls in central Europe’, her son would write more than seventy years later, using his ...”

“... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...”

“... Council. It seems that it is a good moment to kill off all sorts of things. While thousands of young men are exposed unnecessarily to violence, and to its infliction – supposedly on our behalf, more probably to satisfy the vanity of a few unjust men and women, who want to go on running this country for a bit – a whole generation of ...”

“... in Schull, County Cork. Presumably it was a financial blow when his father died, but Synge was too young to feel a difference, and besides there was enough money coming from rented estates in Wicklow. The Synges were landlord-class, with the mentality that went with such privilege. As a young man, John thought himself some ...”

“... very unhappy. The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from ...”

“... Eric Lomax, as a young Royal Signals officer, had the misfortune to get caught up, with a third of a million others, in what has been called a ‘logistic imperative’, an enterprise more vulgarly known as the Death Railway, planned and carried through by the Japanese Imperial Army. At any point in history a logistic imperative is something to be avoided at all costs, whether it involves cutting the Americas in two or building St Petersburg in a freezing swamp ...”