“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... artists inevitably construct and invent their representations of American experience, whatever we may mean by this vague, polymorphous concept, rather than simply revealing a pre-existing entity through a transparent lens. The metaphor is misleading from the start. Certainly, Hughes’s project cannot be faulted on the basis of coverage: it starts out with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”