“... grandparents when his hippie mother declined to pack him along on her spiritual journey – may also notice, with a shiver, that Houellebecq’s murderer in The Map and the Territory is another plastic surgeon with a clinic in the hills above Cannes: father and killer are one. The casual-seeming sentences from Atomised lay bare the kind of associative ...”

“... by the Irgun in the newspaper version of Land of Black Gold when the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. Hergé drove to France with his wife, sister-in-law, niece and Siamese cat, which according to Peeters he sometimes took for walks on a lead. Leopold III surrendered on 27 May; placed under house arrest in his palace ...”

“... at this (or any other) time,’ Burton notes. Marian had a remittance from her family; Bunting may have been helped by his mother (who joined them in Rapallo periodically; his father was dead); I don’t think there was much paid work involved. Bunting advances the perverse and implausible claim: ‘It seems as though Italy were the only climate in which I ...”

“... architecture was a prominent part of this: that’s why German modernist architects like Ernst May were hired to design it. Many of the posters of the time exhort peasants to flock to collective farms that look not unlike Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. The move towards the freakish fantasies and historical references of high Stalinism came later, along ...”

“... in which money can be safely lent are not many, and a clear-headed, quiet, industrious person may soon learn all that is necessary about them’ – advice which might have forestalled half a dozen bank crashes. Bagehot goes on elsewhere to give three warnings to investors, which pretty much exhaust the subject: ‘Have nothing to do with anything unless ...”

“... edge of the Pacific Rim.) The cooking revolution in France was fuelled by the évènements of May 1968 and it shared the anti-authoritarianism of student radicalism, rebelling against the idea of doing things ‘by the book’. Yet, as Steinberger notes, while the student radicals were trying to bring about revolution from the outside, nouvelle cuisine ...”

“... but he is stronger on narrative than on analysis, and I don’t think he really brings out what may be lurking in the mephitic swamp that he explores so well. Perhaps we might approach it by tracing two related but not interdependent trends: the rise of the mass media at the end of the 19th century and the decline of Parliament through the second half of ...”

“... themselves out of business: why go off to live at the edge of a pond, like Thoreau, when you may as well explore the relation of human sociability to nature over a book on the subject, or a lavish transformation of raw into cooked? (It’s also noticeable that nature writing hasn’t caught on there as it has in the UK: in France writing is still first ...”

“... would have led. As it was, the 1830s would see O’Connell in alliance with the Whigs, a link that may have moderated his course as effectively as Parnell’s combination with the Gladstonian Liberals between 1886 and 1890. The failure of the next great popular movement, to ‘repeal’ the Union, and the rise of romantic nationalism in the Young Ireland ...”

“... unfair. I had never had a spellbinding teacher like this and had had to make my own way, which may be one of the reasons I’ve been prompted to write such a teacher now. As the months passed I began to feel that since I could hold my own with these boys in Russian maybe I ought to have another shot at getting a scholarship myself. Besides I was at ...”

“... new Northern Ireland Assembly rejected a motion denouncing power-sharing by 44 votes to 28, on 14 May 1974, the Ulster Workers’ Council announced that the Loyalists would reduce electricity output. The next day they called a general strike, and roadblocks appeared everywhere. Trimble played a significant role in the organisation of the strike, and appears ...”

“... right." The 48 pages of ‘Oblivion’ have been a dream. The narrator’s perspective, which we may have found insufferable, repetitive, pompous or even momentarily criminal, isn’t the husband’s at all. Although we might be tempted to suppose that the dream has been his (after all, we’ve believed we were hearing his voice all along), an unhurried ...”

“... wasn’t rooted in the hostility towards women that seethes through the play. Jimmy Porter may rail against society, boring Sundays and the general peeling-wallpaper crappiness of postwar England, but it’s women who bear the brunt of his hyperarticulate, inchoate tantrums, women who embody and enforce the stultification of life; in particular, his ...”

“... Wordsworth’s hopes and criticisms, on the other hand, are brought sympathetically to light. She may have been her husband’s amanuensis, but she was not an uncritical one, and had a keen eye – or rather, ear – for his dwindling poetic ambitions. In particular, she was privately dismissive of his mid-life addiction to the making of sonnets ...”

“... of prose sketches that he first made his mark, when three pieces appeared in the English Review in May, June and August 1909. His literary career was thus one of several launched by the Review’s perceptive editor, Ford Madox Ford (or Hueffer, as he then was). Lewis is said either to have thrust his bundle of manuscripts wordlessly into Hueffer’s hands, or ...”