“... fit the bare facts of the life. For one thing, Bowie hasn’t stopped singing about death since Major Tom drifted off into outer space in the late 1960s; ‘Here I am/Not quite dying’ goes the opening track on The Next Day. And what about the songs that don’t fit the facts? No one, as far as I’m aware, has suggested that ‘Sue (Or in a Season of ...”

“... skinhead, did not his clothes deny it.’ That quotation well illustrates the style in which John Fowles begins this historical novel, or mystery story, lingering over his descriptions. The reviewer-like use of the present tense, the schoolmasterly ‘not what it means today’, and the reference to ‘a modern skinhead’, invite readers to visualise ...”

“... here provide a fascinating context for, but do not in any way extend, the preoccupations of the major books. Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to ...”

“... once his reputation has passed a certain threshold, is immune from criticism. In the case of major artists, this can itself be destructive (it is possible to attribute Moore’s decline in the Sixties to such irresponsible cossetting), while feebler celebrities are merely given a licence to print money (literally – vide the misleading and ...”

“... one by an American art historian, the other by a British professor of French, which represent major journeys of exploration deep into its heart. Professor Charlton’s is the less ambitious of the two. Because its approach is less overwhelmingly a visual one, it also offers the easier way in. Following in the footsteps of Daniel Mornet, over seventy years ...”

“... disease,’ Adrian Mitchell wrote, ‘to stay small, to create perfect miniatures, to take no major risks.’ On the other hand, you could say, as John Gross has done, that the fault is in the eye of the beholder: ‘While Americans think we’re miniaturists, English people tend to think Americans suffer from ...”

“... in one of his late poems.In Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, his most celebrated poem (John Berger and Anna Bostock’s reissued translation omits the first three words of the title), Césaire is unsparing about Martinique. The Antillean islands are ‘pitted with smallpox’ and ‘dynamited by alcohol’. His home town is ‘inert’ and ...”

“... people need at home or on their doorstep and admit to the big hospitals only patients with major trauma, or suffering diseases that demand intensive care, or complex surgical or biochemical expertise. Big hospitals are to become centres of research, high technology, rare skills and dramatic, life-saving interventions. Everything else will be diffused ...”

“... But politics do not live, or die, on economic differences alone; and even in economic policy, major differences persist, as they do between the Labour and Conservative Parties in Britain on membership of the Euro – and of the European Union. Friedman delights in finding tiro Americans everywhere he goes. On a trip to China in 1998, he fetches up with a ...”

“... than Philip. James now learned that the Spanish Government was planning to undertake a major naval expedition against the Muslim corsairs of Algiers and offered to contribute a number of warships to the expedition. British warships were as welcome in Spain as the Algerine corsairs, but how could Gondomar reject the offer politely? His solution was ...”

“... published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by eminent Anglophone or Continental writers but without much discussion of the nature of autobiographical form. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and ...”

“... are acknowledged masters like Dreyer, Renoir, Bresson, Olmi or Satyajit Ray. Others include less major talents – Vigo, Cocteau, Antonioni, Straub. But how does Lubitsch qualify? Or Sternberg, Hitchcock, Hawks and Orson Welles? Their inclusion seems to me like bracketing Conrad with Edna Ferber or Dashiell Hammett – worthy enough artificers, but not ...”

“... should do things much less ambiguously: their acts cannot be filtered through the head of John Dowell, the rich American simpleton (if indeed that is what he is) who tells the story. Moreover Dowell has to be there with the others, objectively represented as well as in voice-over; and it is beyond the power of any actor to play an impotent bonehead ...”

“... language developed by the Oxford School of Philosophers’ – especially, one may add, by John Austin. Unfortunately Dr Harré finds it necessary to develop his thesis by the use of language that is very far from ordinary. Those who are not familiar with the jargons of philosophy and sociology will find it hard to follow. Nevertheless, for me, the ...”

“... of the two Fausts, has brought out a large volume containing translations of all Goethe’s other major plays, and brief accounts of more than forty other plays, fragments, sketches, operettas, masks and adaptations. Passage faithfully renders Goethe’s prose in prose, his iambic rhyme in iambic rhyme, his blank verse in blank verse. But his blank verse is ...”