“... she left the company to take on other roles (thus initiating this correspondence) suggests she may have come to find it stifling. Pirandello scarcely separates her from himself; all his dreams are for their mutual triumph. ‘Now, in our case the true truth is this: that I am your true father, and that you are my creature, my creature, my creature, in ...”

“... the combined effect of thousands of tiny perceptual connections, microscopic hooks and eyes. His may be the first prose style to be influenced by Velcro. The self-enclosure of his narrators (Baker has yet to risk a third person) is very striking. A surprising amount could be conveyed about the books in which they appear by renaming them, as if they were ...”

“... would have let me walk into the RPG round. I wouldn’t have felt a thing.’ The primal Baggit may know the purple fields better than anyone, but, accordingly, he is least likely of all to adjust to civilian life. His end in the beauty parlour comes as no surprise to Hollywood, who realises that for someone that mean and tough there can be no permanent ...”

“... Night, her novel of manners and Oxford, has not been well understood. Modern detective fiction may be schematically divided, pace Binyon, into stories of the professional (police) and the amateur: the categories correspond approximately to Symons’s ‘crime novel’ and ‘detective story’, which latter he has been eager to declare obsolete beyond ...”

“... case. That the reader will unquestioningly believe what he is told, and, if told it enough times, may even carry on on Fuegi’s behalf, telling his friends, ‘That Brecht was a nasty piece of work, and he didn’t even write his own plays,’ assumes a rather naive view of reading. It also doesn’t allow for fairness, the English equivalent of ...”

“... abandoned, Science Fiction, what one might call psycho-supernatural tales in which what happens may or may not be the product of an overheated imagination. These tendencies in serious fiction seem to mirror the escapist tendencies in popular entertainment, so one of the tasks Parrinder sets himself is to find criteria ...”

“... are seriously short of military and political funding. Eritrea’s status as an Arab issue may well remain assured by its place on the map. The liberation movement itself may continue to elicit considerable interest from the Muslim states. But with Somalia impoverished, Sudan uneasy, Egypt making common cause with ...”

“... four senses, that of scent had not inspired any art, or aesthetic cultivation. (I think Stokes may have overlooked the use of the nose in wine-bibbing.) There is no educational encouragement to improve one’s keenness of smell, no professional applications; and its loss, as insurance policies confirm, is regarded as simply the removal of an unvalued ...”

“... safely. Asquith had no reason by then to abandon his usual generosity and forbearance. He may not have been the only prime minister to view the heir presumptive’s diminished eligibility without undue alarm. The greatest piece of luck lay deeper. The third Reform Act, like the first, betokened a change to a more urban and less deferential ...”

“... America, girls could have a harmonious and sexually-free adolescence. Mead’s field material may well have been crude and her conclusions overdrawn. But so, one might argue, is Grosskurth’s espousal of Freeman’s fuzzy idea of ‘phylogenetically-given impulses’ which underlie culture. Her accusation that Mead was a gullible innocent who ‘acquired ...”

“... Warner, and of their free-thinking patrons, Sir Walter Ralegh and the Earl of North-umberland. He may have known Dr Dee as well. Dr Faustus belongs to, and comments on, this critical phase of magico-scientific transition. The fall of the magician is also the rise of the scientist, the technologist freed (for better or worse) from the metaphysical trappings of ...”

“... but these coinages strike me as coy and opportunistic. Hartman, who is always in earnest, may associate these punnings with what he analyses in Coleridge as a ‘learned or playful yet always compulsive manipulation of words ... linked ... to his quest for unity in all areas of life’ (in another essay he has some searching and sceptical remarks on ...”

“... would hang all too precariously in the air. What about the good will? The feminist anthropologists may not be inclined to forgive the ruses. The feminist scholars have no need to accept her conclusions about Papuan women not being exploited by the men, for they are entitled to define exploitation as they see it, in relation to their practical intentions. But ...”

“... that was obliging men to rebuild the entire structure of society on new foundations.’ They may have shared a feeling that aristocratic privilege imposed a duty to provide sound political leadership, and act as intermediaries between the subject and the state, but they interpreted that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was ...”

“... and although it is no longer so obsessional and so long-lasting as it could once be, it may still determine the individual outlook more than most care to own. The sense of belonging or not belonging, important for Bloomsbury or for the Brideshead Generation written about by Humphrey Carpenter, is less significant than the initial and basic instinct ...”