“... concern is the first reason why we read him, why he is part of the modern canon. To say all this may be obvious, no more than a first move toward understanding and interpretation, but it is at least that. Mme Robert, however, is not interested in the broad human significance of Kafka’s work, if only because in her view the work consists of nothing but ...”

“... in his way. Certain kinds of evidence will be wilfully denied him, certain other kinds may be offered too profusely or inaccurately. The exact nature of these difficulties will vary with the biographer and with the subject. Why is a particular biography written? Is the pop star or the footballer being promoted by an advertising man or denigrated by ...”

“... suicide: he was killing himself in effigy. Nilsen’s desire to understand his own motives may be sincere – he has, after all, nothing left to lose. But his articulacy seems suspect. The danger that his crimes might mean nothing, might have no reason, seems to press on him more strongly than guilt; he is too anxious to secure an explanation; what ...”

“... broth, or something or other’. She and Mary had to sit up to wake him from nightmares. ‘You may think we were busy enough.’ Busy indeed they were, incredibly, devotedly busy, and only about poor Coleridge does Dorothy ever reveal any resentment of the fact. Frugal and temperate as he was, William was not always demanding coffee ‘or something or ...”

“... out of sight by the boots of the man behind him. It is a disturbing and unexpected ending, and it may draw on one of the ‘forgotten attitudes’ to which Kee refers in his introduction. One’s first reaction to it is that it is an error, not of the character’s feeling but of the writer’s judgment, to concede the authority which an ending inevitably ...”

“... the two of them then enacted a little dance or jig to express their pleasure. The occasion may be compared with Mrs Bessie Braddock’s notorious celebration in the newly-elected House of Commons of 1945, when she marked the absence of Winston Churchill from the government Front Bench with a few rhythmic steps. This endearing scene was surprising in ...”

“... turns at looking after their father, thus enabling Beatrice to resume her work in London. By May 1888, happiness was no longer ‘a closed book’. She even writes of days which had ‘been very happy, full of interest and blessed with content’. Her work was now ‘all in all’ to her. Even Chamberlain’s eventual marriage to an American girl was ...”

“... he withstood the rising demand that he submit it to other experts for a thorough examination. In May 1859, however, the new Duke of Devonshire, to whose late father Collier had given it, acceded to the request of Sir Frederic Madden, the Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, that it be lent to him for inspection. The controversial volume thus was ...”

“... in Time, and indeed of all fictional situations which posit the possibility of travel in time. We may be secure in the knowledge that the North defeated the South in the American Civil War. But this does not stop a deranged American army officer from using the time machine to try and forestall the repugnant result. Nor does it absolve the ruthlessly alert ...”

“... sheeps’ guts, a jumble of historical and contemporary costumes, leaden daggers and Hell mouths may seem oddly assorted, Hattaway suggests, but, quaint now, they had a coherence at the time which forbids our condescension. Yet the force of this is somehow lost as the argument is crystallised back into the theory which gave it birth: ‘Costume in fact was a ...”

“... delightful irony and laughter, was apparently to reassure audiences that, whatever the characters may think, ultimately all will be rosy and well. In the tragedies, on the other hand, laughter and even irony are only incidental effects. And while the audience may be granted a knowledge of Iago’s plots, or the true nature ...”

“... opposite impression. This is partly a matter of unfortunate lapses of style. The result of what may be an attempt to pin down every last detail of the argument is that all too often one cannot see the wood for the twigs. But it is not only style that is at work in hindering the reader. Cavell deploys Wittgensteinian resources in order to show us that such ...”

“... sentences of Stendhal, and in the plays of Pirandello. If he was drawn so greatly to Proust this may have been for technical rather than temperamental reasons, for he was not, by all accounts, a Proust-like man: but the awesome elaboration of Proust’s style, and the effortless precision of his mind, offered an ultimate test of the examinee’s powers. We ...”

“... and Gloucester see something where there is nothing’. On page 80, Troilus and Cressida ‘may well be the first play of Shakespeare’s in which the Jonsonian method was deliberately tried out’. But on page 96, it is ‘too early to have been influenced by Jonson’s major new-style plays’. Bayley adopts one view of the chronological relationship ...”

“... nominally fictive quatrain poems lies in the desired diminishment of import. Sweeney’s meaning may be lost, but he still works as a symbol, evoking a sense of threat proportionately massive. Anna, on the other hand, is only a dislocated allusion, a sad verbal gesture, the detritus of a genre retained like any other haunting objet trouvé for its ironic ...”