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“... and having much in common with the easy, unshowy critical penetration of Watt’s contemporary Frank Kermode. But, as his intellectual trajectory suggests, considerable scholarly resources stood surety for this agreeable surface manner. As Watt reflected, his aim had been ‘to transcend what I had learned from the idealist modes of German thought by ...”

“... real live specimens of the Protestant beast, they had initially followed the opinion of Loyola’s close colleague Pierre Favre that dealing with Protestants should be a matter of Christian witness, ‘speaking with them familiarly on those topics which we have in common and avoiding all contentious arguments in which one party might seem to beat the ...”

“... fierce struggle to recover one’s self-respect.’ Her brother in turn had no great wish to live close to her, finding people more tolerable in recollection, or in art.One day​ he set out on a walk from the town (he was a good walker), made his way up the hill and along the Poole Road and eventually arrived at the villa at 63 Alum Chine Road, where he rang ...”

“... His advisers were people he had promoted. Generals who had expressed divergent opinions in ‘frank and informal get-togethers’ had been retired. His political allies were worried that their opportunities to enrich themselves even further would be curtailed if they had to share power with Benazir. What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his ...”

“... it emits fewer than nine tons of carbon per head a year, less than half America’s emissions, and close to the less heavily industrialised EU’s average of 8.5 tons. Japan gets more value out of the energy it does use, more cargo for the kilowatt, than anyone else, but by methods not everyone would accept, if they could postpone the pain by rejecting the ...”

“... all discussion, indeed all thought, instantaneously. In the public imagination, terrorism was close to barbarism – a marriage sanctified by implicitly racist Islamophobia (the term is inadequate, since it focuses on fear to the exclusion of contempt and rage). The obsession with exterminating terrorists had calamitous consequences for US foreign ...”

“... toward something ‘other than imagery – towards narrative’. Having broken a taboo with his frank and sometimes repellent account of his feelings for his parents, Guibert is now free to launch into his most horrendous book, Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes, a nightmarish, stomach-turning récit about capturing and torturing children. The title ...”

“... out in a rash of names, accepts the way English intellectuals have treated ideas by keeping them close to the tea-table or a ‘domestic idiom’. There is little ventilation: no reference (except nominally) to Lukacs, who sets theory against alienation and fragmentation; no acknowledgment of the Frankfurt School’s attempt to frame an ideology-critique; no ...”

“... of the music into the life which is most damaging to the music. Hence, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge reflects ‘all the conflicting states of mind Britten was experiencing while he composed it’, even down to his ‘delight in discovering the Suffolk countryside’ ‘Peter Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... to last?’ A farmer in Yorkshire wrote to the BBC to protest that ‘with over forty years’ close contact with the working classes I am appalled at the accumulating and increasing interest taken by them in this swine’s broadcasting.’ Joyce’s biggest attraction, however, was that he gave a different account of the war’s progress (what little ...”

“... the government’s strategy in the upcoming inquiry will be to blame the scientists. The report, frank in many respects, has an echoing, cathedral-like silence around the personal responsibility of the prime minister. But as Calvert and Arbuthnott make clear, Johnson’s leadership, or lack of it, was central to the government’s failure, then and ...”

“... once music by Muzak was installed, while, at St Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY, Dr Frank B. Flood, chief of cardiology, saw improved recovery rates in the intensive care unit.From the start, the two cardinal aims of Muzak’s operation have been that its music should not draw attention to itself and that it should work in optimal co-operation ...”

“... the same level of normative literary language as the surrounding narration, here the writer comes close to assigning substandard Hebrew to the rude Esau. The famished brother cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for ‘stew’ (nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as (literally) ‘this red red’. The verb he uses for ...”

“... his appalled ‘non-fiction’ book about Stalin and Communism, reviewed in the LRB by Frank Kermode under the rubric ‘Amis’s Terrible News’. For the novelisation, his sources – a narrow range – aren’t so much embellished as systematised, artfully reshuffled and newly dealt. In Koba the Dread Amis, following Solzhenitsyn, wrote that in ...”