“... fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive writing and ...”

“... In an ill-fated military expedition of 1780 aimed at breaking the Spanish grip on Nicaragua, the young Captain Nelson shared a tent – and the rigours of jungle warfare – with Edward Despard, an Irish-born army engineer. Despard’s encounter with maroons and Mosquito Indians transformed his political outlook. Back in London with his black ...”

“... rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’? After all, the Zapatista movement likes to appear as something of a phantom, expressing itself in concealments and ...”

“... the ghosts in accordance with the moral ailments that afflicted their lives. Roger Bevins III, a young gay man who committed suicide, appears covered in eyes, noses and hands, a nod to the sensualist he became in the moments after he slit his wrists. A printer called Hans Vollman, killed by a falling roof beam hours before he planned to bed his ...”

“... in Gay’s view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young lady of 16 who in 1885 was keeping an artless private record at St Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I ...”

“... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...”

“... wound up specially for the match ... Later I was to learn that Venables had turned the key on the young player to get him psyched up for the occasion.’ Scholar hates it when players are called ‘stock’ but is happy enough, it seems, to think of them as clockwork toys. How Venables ‘turned the key’ we do not learn. Venables was of course originally ...”

“... Suzuki at Columbia University, and a brilliant and devoted interpreter acquired in the pianist David Tudor. Although Cage’s chance procedures were extremely time-consuming – many tosses of coins or drawings of yarrow stalks being required for the least decision made with the I-Ching, and computer aid not yet available – that was essentially all that ...”

“... in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as expounding an alien and distinctively Germanic doctrine in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself, although recognising how much he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... of all kinds, one which led me into some very strange cultural places. Any time I heard that, say, David Bowie was only really imitating Anthony Newley, I immediately lost interest in David Bowie and went looking for the source, sometimes with the pitiable results that this example suggests. So I was always moving backwards ...”

“... habit, pausing (presumably) to change his shirt, was to drive into town and take a succession of young women he referred to as ‘dancers’. Would not dwelling on the author’s writing habits be seen as mere gossip and triviality? The question was gravely discussed as the film was edited. Wheldon declared that it was relevant to the consideration of ...”

“... begins at an early stage to try the reader’s patience. The description of himself as ‘the young director’ occurs so frequently it becomes almost a Homeric epithet, while the reader, if nodded to at all, features as ‘the average’ or ‘the ordinary’. Yet despite the exasperation he provokes – for all the vanity, the boasting, the famous names ...”

“... and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of Amis’s strongly-expressed disdain for Wain’s mode and temper of writing. Both novels join in a mood of mellow retrospection. Earlier Amises displayed the ...”