“... than frightening, a faint pastel copy of the object of Prince Myshkin’s intense interest. We may note, as Dmitri Nabokov does, that the lovable executioner foreshadows the jolly M’sieur Pierre of Invitation to a Beheading, and it is true that executions of various kinds loom large in Nabokov’s later work. It is their blandness and their bungling that ...”

“... of life in the intolerable Sertao (Cunha often looks at it this way). When the world is cruel you may pretend it’s about to end. But this is not all, for Vargas Llosa’s subsequent use of Eliot and Simone Weil gives us a clue to one special strength of The War of the End of the World. Where Cunha mostly invoked the language of science to explain Antonio ...”

“... decision to admit the Shah to the United States for medical treatment. The students themselves may well have been acting in this spirit until they, and Khomeini, realised how enormously popular the action was in the current wave of xenophobia. After Bazargan’s resignation, the liberals, including Khomeini’s rival protégés Sadeq Gotzbadeh and Abol ...”

“... has not been Blanchot’s, but he salutes in Joubert a fellow-spirit. His reflection that oblivion may be denied to those who seek it, self-defeatingly, by bequeathing written memorials of themselves, is duplicitous to say the least. There is no obvious modesty in Blanchot’s withholding of himself from the world, but rather censure of our ingrained ...”

“... achieves a ‘kind of revelation’ – but she is quick to dismiss any spiritual overtones that may occur in connection with that experience: ‘all I have wished to do was to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready-made values.’ Heroines thus programmed to fail or to succeed invite a rather ...”

“... a smuttily stammering diplomat, mistranslations (‘The Ministry of Strange Affairs’), which may start a giggle or a groan, as when we’re told yet again that Petworth, a visiting lecturer in linguistics, was ‘not a character in the world historical sense’. Jokes about women’s bodies ‘are quite outstanding, one immediately remarks it’ – when ...”

“... what anthropologists study is the particular knowledge which people in exotic cultures hold. This may be knowledge which takes the form of myth or ideas about plants and animals or about what characterises different types of men. This last type of knowledge, social knowledge often takes the form of kinship systems. For Lévi-Strauss social systems, and ...”

“... his scientists’. Harrington’s sensible suggestion that legislators should assume that citizens may be wicked is taken as an assertion of original sin. But Dr Davis has illuminating things to say about Harrington’s ‘basically federal’ system of government, in which the municipal boroughs were ‘absorbed into the county’, and about his deference to ...”

“... basket cases of the Queen Anne period. It would have been impossible for Swift, however much he may have sympathised with those hapless victims of nature’s malignity and man’s exploitative instincts, to understand their feelings, let alone convey them. The growing concern for suffering humanity in the next two centuries seldom extended to freaks, who ...”

“... refuses to surrender either her love or her understanding of the man she killed – hateful as he may have been. Nor is the truth of the case revealed by the clumsy investigations of the ‘LAW’ (Yglesias capitalises the word, possibly as an expression of authorial scorn; possibly as a reflection of Sally’s humility before male authority). It is only when ...”

“... that, so that he could achieve what was to him a beautiful death. ‘Call that beautiful?’ you may well exclaim, shaking before my eyes the photograph of Mishima’s severed head standing in a pool of blood. It is gory, barbaric, revolting, I admit, but so are the images of slaughter paraded before our eyes almost daily from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Northern ...”

“... merely reintroduced the realistic spy thriller to a public which had forgotten its existence. This may be true. But A Perfect Spy seems to me to add new twists to the topical theme of British treason and the psychology of justified traitors. And insofar as le Carré’s fiction makes spies of his readers, this is the closest that he’s hitherto permitted ...”

“... in plenty, but soon we became inured to them – just as, by the coarsening of habit, a humane man may eventually come to tolerate the spectacle of a bullfight.’ It is on this 1939 Cuban expedition that Lewis begins to express indignation about the United States. New Yorkers, fearing war, were wearing large badges that said ‘Keep America Out’ and ...”

“... times a cowed narrator: ‘I don’t want to be telling this story,’ she tells us. Some readers may regret the toning-down of the humorous strain in Atwood’s work, seen at its best in the withering ironies and controlled surrealist farce of a novel such as The Edible Woman. But the people and things which make up Off-red’s world are as sharply-etched as ...”

“... were more likely to think of themselves as ‘Reformed’ than as ‘Calvinist’. The latter term may fit church discipline better than doctrine, and make better sense when applied to the presbyterian system which Calvin offered Europe as an alternative to episcopacy. Yet Calvinist ecclesiology played only a restricted part in the most potently ...”