“... novels, but the mood has grown nastier. Brenda hooks up with Beaver, an indifferent and snobbish young man who is universally deplored and whom even Brenda recognises as second-rate, and demands a divorce. The beau monde is charmed by so fantastic a romance, and a broken Tony seeks to be obliging; but after various humiliations he puts his foot down and ...”

“... to Blackpool to play poker. You wouldn’t have got me there for any other reason. When I was young, my family used to take day trips to Lancashire’s beach resorts. Each of them – Fleetwood, Cleveleys, Lytham and Morecambe – was desolate in its own way, but none provoked so many tears as Blackpool, all that giddy anticipation disappointed by damp ...”

“... a passing fashion, a too-easily domesticated bag of tricks, and an inexplicable temptation for the young. 7. Contemporary criticism is mainly a product of universities at the metropolitan centres of empire in Europe and the United States. It is the dominant form of ‘advanced’ literary culture at the centre of empire. By contrast, literary culture at the ...”

“... when I asked him which of the other artforms novel-writing was most like.) Lennon captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano. He doesn’t quite explain Mailer’s pugilistic kind of heroism, but he portrays ...”

“... trying to meet Germany half-way towards its legitimate aspirations. Both the middle-aged and the young between the two wars had been pulled emotionally towards Germany. The veterans had formed lively ‘no more war’ associations with their old opponents in the Kaiser’s army; the unsophisticated young enjoyed Bavarian ...”

“... generation’. (His great-grandfather had gone to the Cape Colony in South Africa in 1842.) The young John Pocock moved in 1927 to New Zealand, where his father, Lewis, who had taken a degree in classics after his wartime service, became a professor at Canterbury University College. Pocock’s mother, Antoinette Le Gros, was born in the Channel Islands, the ...”

“... idiom, he was essentially a verist. In fact, his whole quarrel with the operatic stage of his young manhood, which he knew all too well from galley years as chorus master and musical director in more or less decrepit opera houses from Würzburg to Riga, was precisely that it was weighed down by convention and artifice (I’ve always loved his description ...”

“... Persia’s Asia Minor satrapies that he’d initiated was taken over, and vastly expanded, by his young and inexperienced son Alexander. It is all too easy to see why the new Great King, Darius III (a cousin of Artaxerxes III and, like more than one of his predecessors, on the throne as the result of a coup), fatally underestimated the threat of the ...”

“... the butcher or the cattle.’ Why are there no counterparts to Twilight’s ethical vampire, Edward Cullen? Why are there no vegetarian zombies? (Well, undoubtedly there are some somewhere, but if so, they’ve never caught on.) Many zombies don’t merely want food, they want flesh – in the earlier films, human flesh, and lately any kind of ...”

“... that Darwin stole the idea of transmutation through natural selection from the Calcutta naturalist Edward Blyth, and then tried to cover his tracks. Wilson quotes Blyth selectively from a tendentious source, but if he had consulted the original he would have seen that far from anticipating Darwin, Blyth maintained that ‘Providence’ works to preserve the ...”

“... and suffering from the previous night’s exploits take over the narration in the staccato of young adult fiction (‘Legend night. But OMG that taxi driver. Creepy.’) A few paragraphs later, we’re with Margaret Rose and Jane, on the hunt for a miracle cure for the fast-declining Shane. They consider ‘a drop of blessed oil of St Thérèse of Lisieux ...”

“... and responds to the indignation of a woman who has read in the newspaper that one in eight young people has never seen a cow in real life.The first part of the novel becomes a satire of white guilt as it’s performed and experienced online. ‘White people,’ she observes, ‘were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice.’ In the ...”

“... the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.As an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on ...”

“... figure since Layamon’s. What a fate for the hammer of the Saxons, the great obverse of Edward I! All these arguments create in the end a strange, mixed, twiddle-the-tuning-knob kind of effect. I feel sure Lucas is wrong in general, and wrong just because of that culturally-biased, bend-over-backwards, self-exculpating mode so characteristic of the ...”

“... in the first half of the 18th century, as Gilmour contends. But as he also points out, Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt in 1745 to upset that regime met with minimal popular support. Indeed, the Young Pretender was resisted far more vigorously by all classes in England and in Scotland than is suggested here. Crushing ...”