“... by the left elbow, pencil at the right. The image is smudged; one has a skull beside him, one may be a woman, one may be H.G. Wells. They are looking up at the camera; after the shutter has closed they will look down their microscopes and see what they are told to see, for microscopy is a mystery and Huxley its ...”

“... He certainly did not mean to comfort or console us either. He speaks harshly of poets whom we may have admired in our time: ‘A period which can laud the poetry of Keyes is no period for me.’ But he does take care to explain: A war poet is not one who chooses to celebrate a war but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him: he is ...”

“... dramatise by disguise, to the point where disguise itself became the object of art. Homosexuality may have been at the core of this knowledge, but more important was the instinct to personalise sexuality, so that it referred to themselves alone, a pure individualness in which the disguises of art could rejoice and revel, displaying themselves in their own way ...”

“... plausibly increase and accumulate as evolution traverses the path. It appears, in fact, that there may be several such paths; eyes have been independently reinvented many times in the course of evolution. It is, however, one thing to show that evolution might have been mostly adaptation; it is another thing to show that it actually was. Many readers ...”

“... attempt to resurrect the school spirit on the battlefield has a foretaste of doom about it. Tears may after all be in order, tears hardly knowing what they mean, though one knows only too well what they meant for Wilfred Owen in the Somme trenches 24 years later. After that war Newbolt was soon forgotten – in spite of a hugely successful tour of ...”

“... Germany and Austria after 1905. Their equals, emblems of a manner of life doomed by impending war, may be found in almost every bourgeois city-suburb of Europe. If these houses resonate at all, it is not for any special virtue of their own, but because Brooks is adept at capturing the quixotic intensity of belief which Jeanneret brought to their creation. Was ...”

“... a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett wrote his novels and stories. Many are absolute masterpieces, no doubt about that: but the master who wrote them did not think his own process ...”

“... College, London: the women’s drab and pokey, the men’s predictably well-appointed. She may have been just as unworldly and out of touch as Watson’s cruelly depicted victim. The same story can of course be told of women in the arts and humanities. But there are significant differences. The bare minimum for women in the arts is a good library and a ...”

“... to dismantle an entire category of weaponry. The abrupt end of the Cold War, paradoxically, may be the reason, for with attention focused on the collapse of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and ultimately the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, arms control came to seem mundane, even irrelevant. The sense of ...”

“... She thought she herself hardly possessed such a thing, whatever it was.’ A weak sense of oneself may make Alzheimer’s more tolerable: ‘Conceivably it is the persons who hug their identity most closely to themselves for whom the condition of Alzheimer’s is most dreadful. Iris’s own lack of a sense of identity seemed to float her more gently into its ...”

“... his fingers into a knot in irritation at being in the wrong place at the right time, I, who may just possibly be the model for his least important character, have assimilated his most important character to myself. Michael Holme hovers between us, made up of bits of Vikram Seth and bits of me. There are fortuitous factual parallels between me and ...”

“... make any sense. It’s the poverty of the possible in such cases that makes us think the job may be impossible, and of course with poetry the difficulties escalate drastically, since now we have rhythm and tonality and undercurrents and much else to deal with. Paterson says his (excellent) versions of a selection of Antonio Machado’s poems are ...”

“... Capote have severely diminished even as the reputation of O’Connor has steadily risen. McCullers may be perceived in some quarters as a writer of young adult classics whose work has not transcended its era; Capote is little read except for his atypical In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer ...”

“... which deals with extramarital sexual intercourse, stipulates ‘imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years or a fine or both’. In the second place, it was illegal for the same judge to retry his own case in the absence of a judicial review. Unfortunately, this cavalier approach is the norm in the area courts in the North. Husseini was ...”

“... a barricade in the place de la Concorde, and forcing the police to resort to tear gas. Burton may exaggerate the centrality of bloodshed in French political culture, but his close attention to what Natalie Zemon Davis has called the ‘rites of violence’ reveals some enduring historical patterns. As he puts it, episode after episode of ‘almost ...”