“... Lowry one is never far away from the thought that although there is an illness there may also be a cure.’ They obtruded and impended like the gods in the life of a Greek, but when it came down to it, they remained offstage, sat on their hands, and he gave his life to their absence. He is the one whom the gods did not save. Despite the offer ...”

“... sharp reference to ‘the vague and wild politics which have brought him so much money’ may have contained a misplaced insinuation as to motive, but it hit on one of the forms of insecurity which underlay Parnell’s landlordly anti-landlordism. It may also subliminally have referred to the role of Willie’s wife ...”

“... and the anguish of such art is that it can never be quite identical with itself, that while it may strive to reconcile its various elements, it also knows that any such utopian resolution, in a history which includes Auschwitz, must be an insulting illusion. Modern art turns its back on society, and this refusal to have any truck with a degraded human ...”

“... recognise the radical sophistication of their poetry. ‘Tennyson is another poet whose poems may be put before “virginibus puerisque”,’ an anonymous advice book of 1881 confidently assured its readers, before going on to issue the usual warnings against Richardson and Smollett. For Sarah Stickney Ellis, poetry was particularly suited to women ...”

“... you see it landing heads, that a second coin in London is landing tails. Paradoxical though this may be, it is accepted by almost every physicist. What distinguishes Bohm and Hiley is their eagerness to use it as a reason for speaking of ‘non-local’ influences: influences that help to pull the universe into a single whole. Themes like these are woven ...”

“... it – has been noticeably on the wane within the academy for a couple of decades now, but Lewis may just have cottoned onto a possible means of prolonging it. Liberal humanist criticism, in other words, might take on a new lease of life if it could only motivate itself to stake a claim in the field of British popular culture, where there are not only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Amory reports, is ‘the most ancient in Europe that it has been possible to tabulate’. (There may be other contenders – but who’s tabulating?) At her memorial service Noel Annan told the story – it’s repeated here – of how ‘at a dance she heard O’Neill ask his partner to sit out on the stairs. “I don’t want to do that,” objected the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Government’s Indian commitment with such indecent and tragic haste in 1947. For this Churchill may be thought to have had nobody to blame but himself, for without his patronage it is questionable whether Mountbatten would ever have risen above Commodore. As Ziegler describes, he was a disastrous flotilla captain, without the meanest grasp of strategy or ...”

“... when they believe intervention will advance their interests. The norms of international behaviour may induce them to create political or rhetorical artifices to disguise their real intentions: but those norms do not often seem to alter behaviour. A case in point is a recent speech by Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger outlining the circumstances that ...”

“... Faced with this kind of derogation, and considering how much time writing reviews can take up, it may be worthwhile to take stock. What is the point of taking on regular reviewing assignments? Shippey’s answer is something of a let-down. The point, it seems, is that reviewing, with its ‘discipline’ of ‘real’ deadlines, concentrates the academic ...”

“... 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 ...”