“... lay upon a grave, or bed’ then had to qualify that by writing: ‘(at least, some cold and close-built bower)’; in ‘The Fish’, when she wrote the words ‘his lower lip’, she had to wonder ‘if you could call it a lip’. Before she could allow the mountains in ‘Arrival at Santos’ to be ‘self-pitying’, she had to impose the words ...”

“... in this new vein. A group of natural philosophers on their way home from the Arctic Circle have a close encounter with a pair of vast Lockean-minded aliens who are on their own fact-finding mission to planet Earth. The question is whether the encounter of small with large will reveal anything of interest, or if aliens are merely a version of us, and here a ...”

“... begins 15 blocks north); and Kazin’s apartment at 111th Street is said to be conveniently close to the George Washington Bridge, which is in fact at 186th Street and nearby only to a fanatical walker like Kazin. These are extremely minor things but they lead you to wonder whether Cook has ever been to New York. Similarly, he doesn’t seem that ...”

“... backed the creation of a committee to investigate the CIA’s domestic spying, headed by Senator Frank Church. But the committee also came across evidence of the CIA coup in Chile, as well as the Kennedy brothers’ efforts to have Fidel Castro assassinated. Church, an aspiring presidential candidate and devotee of Camelot, chose not to look too closely into ...”

“... the decades proceed, the possibilities shift. When a male graduate student joins the programme – Frank S. Hogg is his Mad Magazine name – he ends up with the new Pickering Fellow from Mount Holyoke, Miss Sawyer. They both keep working, and Sawyer goes on to win a prestigious prize. Later Bart Bok, just 22, turns up, and is starry-eyed for Miss ...”

“... editors of the Collected Papers, therefore, have not only had to provide the source material for a close study of Russell’s work: they have also had to generate discussion of it themselves. This they (and others) do in Russell, the journal of the Archives, which comes out twice a year. In addition, there have now been two full-length studies of the work ...”

“... his policies are acted on. He appears to have the stomach for continued leadership, however: his close ally, the Speaker of the upper house, Vladimir Shumeiko, has proposed a prolongation of Presidential and Parliamentary terms by two years – a move which many see as the determination of the new political class to cling to office for as long as ...”

“... to such a friendship; the Oxford Movement pullulated with passionate attachments; two of the most frank avowals, which Richard Jenkyns quotes in his masterly study of the Victorian conception of Ancient Greece, came from Disraeli. Of course there were in the Nineties the Uranians and the aesthetes, disciples of Cory or Symonds or Carpenter, who justified ...”

“... gunning the lines. I’ve never had a hand grenade thrown at me, but a rifle grenade struck rather close. Maybe I’ll get a hand grenade later. He could never laugh at the young man he had been. He laughed instead at the writers the young man had read and who were kind to him. The epigraph to The Torrents of Spring is from Fielding: ‘The only source of the ...”

“... worked between creels. Maxwell’s last book, Raven Seek Thy Brother is a darker, more frank affair. It opens on the hillside above Camusfeàrna, now forested, with Maxwell ‘surveying what I had done to Camusfeàrna … what I had done to the animals and what I had done to myself’. He presents two photographs. In the first, the house in ...”

“... to be to see what fresh daily complaint you can hurl at my hot head’. Yet they were remarkably close. Both rose early – often at 4 a.m. – and both had a strong desire to be useful. After resisting for many years, Waldorf allowed her to convert him to Christian Science, to which she had turned after a bout of persistent bad health. ‘It couldn’t be ...”

“... to read him or consult him.GP: Do you enjoy reading him?TP: I haven’t really read one, to be frank. I haven’t even read A Human Document, as book.GP: So when you bought it, you started work on it straight away?TP: I found things of interest in it. I didn’t realise it would go on so long. I’m still doing it.GP: Will it ever be finished?TP: I’ve ...”

“... dogs; once the hounds have ripped them apart, their market value is decreased. Hannah’s novel is frank about the sexual abuse of black women, which reinforces the South’s ‘domestic institution’ by breeding more slaves, and in addition poisons the marriages of the whites. She describes how white mistresses and black maids grow ...”

“... the process of his writing should flatten them, and be seen to do so. Gurnah’s novel, though, close as it sticks to Daud’s sorely-tried consciousness, chooses to operate at a third-person distance, and thus takes on a greater responsibility in terms of roundedness for Catherine. The chief difficulty comes with Catherine’s dialogue, which reproduces ...”

“... large and universal that it burns off all family chills. When Vidia intimates that he has become close to an Englishwoman, his father, after warning against mixed marriages, concludes his letter: ‘the only thing that matters to me – and to all of us at home – is your happiness.’ In some respects Seepersad Naipaul must have been an ideal father: on ...”