“... Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In this privately-sponsored Olympic Games that wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates ...”

“... of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The rummager among old books has done his bit again. Warton may have been Camden Professor of History at Oxford when he knew Malone, but he seems to have been quite happy in his role as under-labourer. He is often sent scuttling off to the Bodleian by his ambitious ‘friend’. He seems to relish being asked, say, to ...”

“... will increasingly call for firm handling. For Professor Colin Matthew a more difficult task may be to find contributors who can write accessibly about the work of geneticists, crystallographers and the adepts of quantum mechanics. Reviewers tend to quote the more boggling passages and then pass on, perhaps, to the more intelligible subject of ...”

“... in A Spell of Winter, transposed a notch in Talking to the Dead); and the related death that may or may not have been murder. Both novels are cramped by the country house and by the agoraphobic woman self-imprisoned there. The reader is glad to come up for fresh air on leaving such claustrophobic narrative ...”

“... laureate as a man lagging well behind the work. Readers who have drunk deeply from the novels may recognise in the letters the same irritable, restless intelligence and charming vulgarity, but there is scant compassion, less pity and precious little visionary wisdom. ‘I don’t know why one would ever expect more than simplicity from the great,’ he ...”

“... or invent transgressively butch symbols. Despite such signs that the shiftiness of the material may swamp her purposes, Rand now engages in a climactic tug of war. Can the desirable doll be wrested from Mattel for political ends? Can she be bad enough to become counterculturally good? Yes and no. Essex Hemphill’s poem ‘Soft Targets’, about the black ...”

“... site for Goldhill to make his revolutionary claim that sex in the ancient world, penetration even, may well have been bound up with power and a whole host of other things, but it belonged first and foremost to the realm of play. Here, sexual rules are not simply obeyed or broken, but teased and negotiated; nature and her norms are refracted through layers of ...”

“... across the South traverse ... If proceeding west (i.e. from Sty Head) the two rising branch-paths may be followed by mistake without realising that the traverse has been left, they being the more distinct, a circumstance that does not arise when proceeding east. And so on and so forth, for something like two hundred fells. Should we really treat the ...”

“... economic liberalisation very directly: at the next opportunity, a majority of the electorate may decide to vote for go-slow Communists, or even hardline Stalinists – though even they could only stop further privatisations, not reverse the process. The political threat is real enough, but in purely economic terms the conventional wisdom is all wrong. To ...”

“... what the Front can do about its bugbears: immigration, crime, bad government and corruption. They may fall flat on their faces. Jacques Bompard, the new Mayor of Orange, hardly inspired confidence when he proclaimed that the country has gone back to the Middle Ages and so his citizens must be protected in medieval ways – with barriers around the town which ...”

“... Rainbow Theatre, the Ramones at New York’s CBGB, the Sex Pistols tramping around London, Derrik May in Detroit and Nirvana on the road to Tijuana. The collection is a massive improvement on the comparable Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing, sparkier by far, and closer to the lived experience of fans and bands. It ignores cultural theorists with their ...”

“... that is soft at the centre. The Irish-Australians and the Catholics in Keneally’s novels may be larrikins, they may be faulty and flawed, but none of them is ever mean at the core. One can never say the same for the non-Irish and the non-Catholic. Nevertheless, Keneally’s lapses are redeemed and overshadowed by ...”

“... gives the impression that, necessary though his ideological alliance with the molecular biologists may be, he is uncomfortable with their disregard for the richness and biodiversity of the living world. Molecular biologists after all only recognise the existence of five species out of the ten million or so that inhabit the globe: rats, fruit flies, nematode ...”

“... of their kind, make a satisfying and legible symptom, and they affirm the hope that the personal may be the political. Mary is a tissue of reshuffled data from Wollstonecraft’s life. The heroine escapes from her family to solitude and books (‘Thomson’s Seasons, Young’s Night-Thoughts and Paradise Lost’), and finds an older woman, Ann, who seems ...”

“... of the Gothic carry us too far beyond the simple devoutness that responded to the terror. That may be why the good old horror film, in its pre-sophisticated stage, was more faithful than literature has since been to the properties of Gothic which Mrs Barbauld had in mind. Her ‘terror’ may have been a simple form of ...”