“... letters, it is interesting to compare the impact of Roth’s work with that of his polar opposite, Bernard Malamud. Nobody could accuse Malamud’s tight and perfect fables of anything in the slightest bit crude or vulgar or self-advertising. Roth himself admitted as much in The Ghost Writer, whose meta-hero, the saintly E.L. Lonoff, was read by most readers ...”

“... they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well known’. Tristan Bernard satirised the alien-seekers in a story in which humanity, on receiving an unintelligible message from Mars, writes huge messages across the Sahara: ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What are you making signs for then?’ ‘We’re not talking to ...”

“... not appreciated by those who wanted something more emotionally taxing from their composers. George Bernard Shaw was one such critic, though he found a more subtle explanation for his discontent than blaming Stanford for overhasty thought and cheap plagiarism. He noted in him ‘a record of fearful conflict between the aboriginal Celt and the ...”

“... some unfamiliar literary material. Antonio Fernández-Puertas on ‘Spain and North Africa’ and Bernard O’Kane on ‘Iran and Central Asia’ both show mastery of their subject. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout and many of the images of Chinese and sub Saharan mosques will be unfamiliar even to those working in the field of Islamic ...”

“... ways by going back to the folk tale), or to do something new with what was already there. Bernard Shaw’s answer to this problem was to take the old format and reverse it: faced with parental obstacles, his young people simply defy them, or, more often, one of the two abandons the game, usually for ideological feminist reasons. Although not a ...”

“... he defends scholars singled out for attack in Orientalism (H.A.R. Gibb, Gustave von Grunebaum and Bernard Lewis among others), before moving on to a chapter-length critique of Orientalism itself. So how effectively does Irwin challenge Said? Factual purists will be delighted by his pot-shots. He makes mincemeat of such sweeping assertions as ‘Britain and ...”

“... of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deems her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the ...”

“... that developed between analytic and Continental philosophy, the latter epitomised by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into ...”

“... of Trotsky and Stalin, was in the Warsaw flat of his closest friend, the political journalist Bernard Singer, early in October 1938 when the Wehrmacht’s entry into the Sudetenland was reported on the radio. ‘There were the roaring, beastly voices of the Nazi leaders, the goosestepping and the drum-beating, all as loud, as close as if the whole thing ...”

“... These five books continue in then very different ways the intense debate about the purpose of literary criticism and its relation to ‘theory’. Addressing Frank Kermode has its origin in a conference devoted to Kermode’s work. Five papers selected from those delivered at the conference are followed by a reply from Kermode himself; five more follow which ‘acknowledge, more or less directly’, his ‘influence ...”

“... with Cyril Connolly. No doubt Orwell would have said it was essentially true. He once praised Martin Chuzzlewit, with its mixture of travel book and fiction, as ‘a good example of Dickens’s habit of telling small lies in order to emphasise what he regards as a big truth’. The power of prep schools to corrupt children was, to Orwell, a big ...”

“... doubtless be blessed by their absence: but we live in a world containing Peter Mandelson and Sir Bernard Ingham. This sobering thought is not banished by wishfully thinking of the Internet as a cybernetic samizdat, where the citizenry of orbis tertius partake of free discursive interchange: the problem is not that the Net’s freedom from distortions has ...”

“... of Access, and most quickly susceptible of Friendship and Acquaintance’. As his fellow physician Bernard Mandeville observed, you could with application ‘drink yourself into Practice’. Another way to make a medical noise had opened up by the late 17th century, and this was conspicuously to challenge common sense through a display of Newtonian ...”

“... of groups stretching from Ian Paisley’s branch of the Unionists through to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and whoever they officially or unofficially represent. Typically, this ‘peaceful solution’ seems to involve shuffling Northern Ireland into a closer relationship with the Irish Republic and trying to get the spectrum of political groups to ...”

“... by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often ...”