“... weakens boosting, and the gas it turns into, helium-3, absorbs neutrons. Eventually, boosting may fail so badly that the most destructive part of a hydrogen bomb – its ‘secondary’ – fails to ignite. Published figures suggest that if this were to happen in a modern, miniaturised warhead, its yield, or explosive force, could be reduced to less than ...”

“... social niceties which oil everyone’s wheels. He is surprisingly low in self-confidence, which may be one reason he sets so much store by the trappings of authority. He is also genuinely interested in the big issues, and more concerned about them than he is with the usual who’s-up, who’s-down chit-chat which dominates the bars and tea-rooms of ...”

“... utter the profound Post-Modern truth that ‘Politics is showbiz for ugly people.’ Yes, you too may be a mediocre, flaky-scalped, pudgy sycophant. But, with the right ‘skills’, you also can possess a cellular phone and keep a limo on call and ‘take meetings’ and issue terse directives like ‘I want this yesterday, understand.’ Unfortunately, the ...”

“... on acquiring a new carpet, stitch together newspapers to form protective paths by which guests may reach their chairs. Inevitably, she has pounced on the diaries of Hannah Cullwick, the happy drudge-bride of Arthur Munby, a man of letters in thrall to grubby working women, the grubbier the better. She has spotted the passage in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman ...”

“... jünger for his anti-republican politics during the Weimar period and his service under Hitler may have seen in Venator a defiant self-portrait. Thomas Nevin, in what might be an oblique reference to the passage, reminds them that there is a difference between literature and politics and that ‘the Autor, the anarch, is a Rousseauist construct, safeguard ...”

“... Lassiter an archetype was born: the lone-wolf cowboy and gunman searching for something that he may never find (in this case, an abducted sister), middle-aged, world-weary but alert, hard and lean as whipcord, a man of few words, invincible in gunplay, and a dispenser of Solomonic justice. As portrayed first by Tom Mix, then by Randolph Scott, the Lassiter ...”

“... Horne that he is writing a poem, ‘some of which he read to me, and I like very much’. This may well have been an early version of Modern Love, in which case Catherine would have been the first to witness the transformation of the wrangling couple into ‘two rapid falcons in a snare/Condemned to do the flitting of the bat’. A striking and sardonic ...”

“... Disarmament and declares the ‘garrison intellectual’ to be ‘alive and well’. The allusions may be apposite, but the academic freedom issue remains unclarified. We are merely told that academics will continue to take sides on the leading ideological controversies of their time, exercising their rights as citizens to do so. Are they also crossing the ...”

“... frost still lay.’ There’s a feeling of optimism on the last pages, a feeling that the spring may imply rebirth, new ways of living, a freedom from personal or political repression. But with her characteristic cool integrity, Penelope Fitzgerald refuses to commit herself, and she leaves us with a whole series of questions, about Frank’s marriage, about ...”

“... of female self-discovery with male self-indulgence, however different in purpose the two drives may be. Not for nothing did D.H. Lawrence begin Women in Love with that uniquely memorable conversation between Ursula and Gudrun, although it is of course orientated to their feeling about men. Significantly, Lawrence does not ‘dream’ about women, but wishes ...”

“... was good and original pedagogy to be droll. To be so on the subject of the extremely upper classes may seem less useful. They evidently caused him to suffer, to fear that they might think him common, or, nastiest of all their put-downs, middle-class. Betjeman was undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of ...”

“... Darcourt provides a sort of artistic mediation, and if any character other than Cornish himself may be said to possess the action of the trilogy, it is Darcourt. He is in many ways worthy of the role, although he suffers, I think, from an affliction which is shared by some of Davies’s other characters: he often does not quite measure up to his ...”

“... words ‘whimsical’ and ‘primitive’ be removed from the publisher’s catalogue: ‘There may be echoes in her work of past poets – Lear, Poe, Byron, the gothic romantics and Hymns Ancient and Modern – but these are deceitful echoes, as her thoughts may also seem deceitful, at first simple, almost ...”

“... he tells us after describing the Hama insurrection in which as many as ten thousand people may have been killed, ‘but resorted to it only for raisons d’état or in what might laxly be called self-defence.’ Perhaps the argument itself is rather lax. Only psychopathic dictators ‘revel’ in killing; the others revel in power and, like Asad, are ...”

“... feminist dictum when he makes a great to-do about the ‘difference’ of women, a difference that may gain its happiest expression in the kitchen. Gender, according to the authors of Nostalgia and Sexual Difference, is among the pointers to a worrying backlash against the Women’s Movement in America, with feminists (rechristened ‘Amazons’) held to blame ...”