“... sheepishly accepted received ideas. There was, he thinks, a coterie spirit in Sur: Ocampo may have been Madame Victoria for Robbe-Grillet, but for John King she was Madame Verdurin.. It isn’t clear, however, that King himself isn’t speaking to a coterie, though a different and very much larger one. He certainly drops sufficient hints as to where ...”

“... have left grimly romantic records, so that carrying a knife, and readily using it in a scrap, may just have been what all tough sailors do. Even so, we had a problem. The explanation that the twenty-year-old killer had knocked about where life was cheap didn’t quite bring his action into focus: our experience of fights, aggro, rumbles, of the serious ...”

“... works from an economic-ideological one to a ‘practical’ one. He seems to suggest (though I may have misunderstood him) that this was more than just tactical: it represented an important intellectual modification of the Treasury View. But Hopkins’s later evidence to the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance was a full-blooded statement of what we ...”

“... make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul.’ That at least we might have guessed, and how did the Master miss it? (Gassy? Chassis? Ecstacy? Or racy?) Not, of course, that there was anything of the clipped staccato of the Entre Deux Guerres about Frazer’s cadences and ...”

“... is the description of Shoe’s childhood in Oldham, an unlovely textile town which, like Wigan, may have been built expressly to be the butt of jokes. There is much of the flavour of Oldham life in this first chapter. Shoe’s grandfather, it seems, was stoned to death by little boys. Her father, when courting her mother, placed a Valentine’s Day token ...”

“... 1975, I commented that ‘not only the voyeur and the gossip but the ordinarily sympathetic reader may sense here and there that the whole truth has not been permitted to emerge: dot-dot-dots come at crucial points, where one suspects an editorial decision has been made that certain names shall not be named, certain facts shall not be dragged out into the ...”

“... were hoping for conversions, and it is suggested that the millenarian current strong in England may have had an influence on Jewish thinking. Old Testament thinking certainly had an influence on the nascent English imperialism of Cromwell and his fellow Puritans. Another Chosen People was taking the stage, and Ireland was undergoing the fate of Canaan long ...”

“... itself within the heritage of prior translations, is a radically hermeneutic act. Translations may, indeed, be the most immediate of critical-interpretative means. The more so when they are the work of poet-scholars such as C. Day-Lewis and Robert Fitzgerald or of so remarkable a stylist as Jackson Knight (time and again, one finds oneself reverting to his ...”

“... as they abandon its humanistic apparatus of dedicatory epistles and pointed marginalia. This may give the book a kind of accessibility but it obscures the work’s origins in a movement that was as serious about its wit as it was in its scholarship. The new Cambridge edition is an elegant reminder of its Latinity, its humanism and its seriousness. Robert ...”

“... In many ways Thompson’s books always carried his readers a little further into pulp-amorality-may-hem than they may have been prepared to go. Certainly his books never failed to deliver those goods touted on the garish tricolour covers: women trussed up on the floor after a beating, or buxomly offering bottled liquor to ...”

“... the ground. Geometrical regularities in the way curved surfaces shade off suggest that the brain may use such regularities to simplify the process of deriving information about the shape of objects from information about their luminance. The book also deals with the problems which arise when you try to teach a computer to recognise an object. Shadows are ...”

“... to turn narrative ineptness into an artistic method. It is at this level that Proust’s principle may be right after all, even for Cohen: Cohen’s deep indifference to causality and plausibility does allow his book to hang alarmingly together as a phantasmagoric display of a certain view of the world. Meanwhile, back at the abduction, waiting in ...”

“... accustomed to imploding on their microspecialisations than to lifting their eyes to worlds that may, as J.B.S. Haldane famously said, be queerer than we can ever imagine. Nor was much enlightenment to be drawn from a recent TV documentary on genetic engineering (typical of its genre), inevitably beginning with the Nazi eugenics movement and ending with ...”

“... houses: ‘When such a road has reached your door it has no necessary further existence; it may straggle along somewhere else or it may not ... The important thing, really, about roads like this is not where they end but the lives they touch on the way.’ Along this particular nameless road all the houses, all ...”

“... out in Majorca along with a Spanish grandee, not the marrying kind, so that her hostess may the more easily entertain her newly arrived lover, an English lord. Rumours? There’s a duke’s daughter who may be turning into a man, and there’s somebody who is ‘marrying a man with no legs and two wives’. It ...”