“... contemporary society out of their books. The critic pointing at this with cries of justification may still be guilty of spotting the 1 per cent and letting the 99 go by. Is Science Fiction, then, always a metaphoric reflection of (or on) society? And what in this context might ‘metaphoric’ mean? There can be no doubt, at least initially, about George ...”

“... close-packed into a compass smaller than that of the Isle of Wight’. It is possible that Barnes may not have read Williams-Ellis: he may only have read John Gaze’s history of the National Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through ...”

“... fear.’ ‘Why,’ said I to myself, ‘this explains all. The poor girl is beside herself.’ It may have been largely to placate these anxieties that Lister proposed a formal sanctification of the relationship. ‘It should be the same as a marriage & she would give me no cause to be jealous – made no objection to what I proposed, that is, her declaring ...”

“... make the best writers about war, and a novelist’s knowledge of the world he describes may have little bearing on the success of his novel. To write a work of club fiction, dependent as it is on successful translation from another art form, is therefore a far more ambitious project than it may at first appear; it ...”

“... Whispering Gallery, the first volume of his autobiography, he describes the planning stages: ‘I may even have toyed with the idea of starting a new international literature.’ Taking an ‘optimistic and Marxist view’, he found contributions from France, Spain, Russia and Poland, and New Writing seemed, in its beginnings, the authentic voice of violence ...”

“... evidence to link Benes to the assassination; and Benes himself later denied involvement. Yet on 15 May 1942, just before the assassination, Benes had observed that ‘an act of violence such as disturbances, direct subversion, sabotage or demonstrations, might be imperative or even necessary in our country. It would save the country internationally, and even a ...”

“... to get a sustained spell of paid leave from the school, came to nothing. (However desperately he may have wanted to transform the circumstances of his life, one can’t help feeling that his wish not to do so was always marginally stronger.) He exhibited his pictures in various Polish cities without success. It says a great deal, however, for the ...”

“... you were one. But you would have to forget in order to achieve the effect that Woolf describes. We may feel that Woolf’s preference for obliquity is too passive and too polite – in any event we have our writers, whether we want them or not – but the effect she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry ...”

“... staircase, apparently intending to reach the strongbox. He was paid off just in time. The Humberts may have treated written agreements with scorn, but they had a sympathetic respect for physical aggression and criminal damage. An unnamed creditor turned up one morning, demanding a repayment of 250,000 francs (about £750,000 today). He waited with the other ...”

“... over, and shows a label saying ‘Wouwerman’. Martin is undeterred and pedantic. The label may simply mean School of, Circle of, Follower of, Style of – ‘or nothing much at all’. ‘Too much to hope that “Wouwerman” might mean Wouwerman?’ Tony asks. Martin has no doubts at all about this. ‘That’s the one thing it doesn’t mean.’ And ...”

“... surgeon grown rich from the silicone implant business, his mother a narcissistic hippy who may as a girl have danced with Jean-Paul Sartre but has been going downhill ever since, to end as her looks fade amid the fatuities of the New Age. Bruno has begun as a boy in cruel neglect; he can only, as a defeated, no longer erectile sensualist, end in ...”

“... uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the happy chance of a close relative being in charge of a nearby prisoner-of-war camp, had become acquainted ...”

“... 1894, whose reasoning, as Stephen Walker points out, is extremely rum. It rules that ‘in no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower on the psychological scale.’ Walker reasonably remarks that it is not even clear whether explanations of ...”

“... of history and a theory of genius. If they make no decision and offer an even-handed balance, they may only betray that Raphael bores them. People expect to be bored by Raphael. One of the first impressions of their excellent book is that Jones and Penny do not mean to give us time to be bored: they hurry on with a briskness that is often on the brink of ...”

“... people with a world-view radically different from their own. To accept that is to accept that they may have been wrong in some of their most basic assumptions about America in our time, that they have made some of the same mistakes in interpreting their own society that they recently made in interpreting Iran. It is to recognise that the progressive modernism ...”