“... the editors thought it would be too far-fetched for Western readers. Radical Chinese nationalists may also be happy to see Trump re-elected. They have nicknamed him ‘the nation-builder’, because he has improved Chinese understanding of American hypocrisy and rallied people round the flag.Claims of double standards, Western hypocrisy and whataboutism are ...”

“... a go of Moominpappa’s ambition to be a lighthouse keeper. Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea may well owe something to Poe. In it, the trolls find the lighthouse deserted, the light broken and on a table hundreds of tiny scratches in groups of six, with a seventh drawn through to mark the weeks: ‘Week after week all the same, except one which had only ...”

“... seedy men. The resourceful Hattersley women come out much better, and I fancy that the novelist may have had his view of things from some grandmother, or aunt. The story has a sharp edge of sexual spite to it. Similarly unsentimental, and presumably all his own, is Hattersley’s analysis of British industrial decline in the late 19th century. It is ...”

“... in the sense of what it means to be a Catholic: so this has to be addressed, however much we may feel – in Muriel Spark’s case, anyway – that the field has already been ploughed pretty thoroughly. Perhaps another way of approaching Spark’s fiction would be to consider the distinction between those novels which are written around a ...”

“... in this case, the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham – and even there, alas, such a job may not be possible again. What are the attractions of following up on this immense initiative? The major one, for literary scholars, must be the provision of a new perspective on Renaissance poetry, drama, literary criticism and history. Drama, Binns notes, has ...”

“... from the dreary repetition of past error – so long as we see theory for what it really is (which may not be how all theorists see it). ‘As I use the term here’, Graff states, literary theory is not ‘a set of systematic principles, necessarily, or a founding philosophy but simply an inquiry into assumptions, premises, and legitimising principles and ...”

“... the reader understand all, and hope those you see will forgive each other. In novels Australians may think more than they say. What do Digger and Vic, in The Great World, talk about? Does Vic talk about the money he has made?   ‘Doesn’t ’e talk to you about it?’ he asked Digger.   ‘No. Why should ’e? I don’t know anything about ...”

“... of nearly two centuries, absence of mourning, and forgetfulness, are difficult to pin down. It may be true, as Bowlby proposes in the epilogue, comparing Darwin’s case with that of a 20th-century woman who had lost her mother as a young child, that ‘had he embarked on psychotherapy, Darwin ... might also have recalled some of the items he was ...”

“... the stone, and found it shattered into little pieces. This theme – that too much praise may be the next best thing to murder – has been taken up in America, where several books have recounted the miserable fate of the first novelist who meets with overwhelming success and then spends the rest of his life calamitously struggling to keep up with ...”

“... a Jewish intellectual in Moscow, ‘rumours of pogroms are now a fact of political life. Violence may break out at any moment, and in such an event we cannot rely on the Police to protect us.’ Equally hard to predict is the future course of Jewish emigration – another issue which carries a heavy emotional charge. Here, too, there has been a general ...”

“... editorship of McKenzie and Ian Willison) will follow the Darnton model in its main outline and may indeed have been inspired by it.* Darnton has moved on from Publishing History (more’s the pity). The essay that will attract most interest in The Kiss of Lamourette is the author’s reply to Chartier’s criticisms of The Great Cat Massacre. Now called ...”

“... conditions of work of all people under the age of 21 totally out of regulation, so that employers may now, within the law, employ juveniles at any rate of pay whatever. Objections to that move did not, I think, stem as Hahn would have it from ‘intellectual laziness’ or ‘stupidity’, but from dismay that the Government should have dismantled a ...”

“... servants to something like market pressures. This was not in itself a despicable ambition and it may lead to greater flexibility and efficiency. But the most important result of the reform will be (already has been) to distance the agencies even further from those they are supposed to serve. Severing their already exiguous connection to Parliament makes them ...”

“... the number and availability of guns in this culture has never been adequately researched. But it may be significant that one of the rare occasions in this period on which protesters did seize guns and threaten to use them was in the Liverpool seamen’s strike in 1775. It seems likely that many of the men involved had spent time in the Royal Navy and had ...”

“... footage of freeway snafu: a cortege of squad cars and outriders from Burrell’s precinct. This may not be the place, nor I the disinterested correspondent, to mull the chicken-and-egg riddle of schlocky infotainment and pulp TV news, but it is not in dispute that one follows the other in LA schedules: the first television of any kind that I absorbed ...”