“... but they never succeeded, except in their own estimation. Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that Carlyle had a famous quarrel with Mill, in which most observers would have favoured Mill. Something deep in Mill’s outlook offended Toryism, old or ...”

“... stillness. And they do. And they do so without needing to evoke the transcendental, though they may. Their re-latedness to the northern Romantic tradition suggests that they might well be a counterpart to the Abstract Sublime in painting. But they do not aspire to the cosmic grandeur of Newman or the cosmic energy of Pollock or the cosmic pathos of ...”

“... over the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, making the point that whatever the final verdict may be on the question of forgery, it is well to remember that no great Scottish writer has failed to display questionable, if not criminal, characteristics in regard to his personal character or in connection with his work, and that, even if the charges against ...”

“... to be covertly feminist. All those women with swan necks bared are waiting for deliverance. We may think the bat swooping in through the casement window is headed straight for the jugular, but what is really going on, Auerbach says, is ‘women opening windows beyond the family and, in the guise of vampire victims, surging into themselves’. The ...”

“... The discriminating literary critics from the NKVD who ransacked Mandelstam’s apartment in May 1934 agreed. Soon after Mandelstam’s arrest, Stalin phoned Pasternak and asked him whether Mandelstam was a ‘master’. As Coetzee explains, ‘we can be sure Stalin was not asking because he regarded great artists as above the state. What he meant was ...”

“... melancholy and forgiving, and never boring. The operative terms of the subtitle are key: the life may have been unedifying, but given the times in which that life had to be lived (and Rubenstein vividly reconstructs them) it is impossible to remain wholly unsympathetic. True, the laudable instinct for fair play does occasionally cross the line into ludicrous ...”

“... Monday 14: Wrote and posted letters to Penny Durrell-Hope and Simon Callow. It seems possible we may see him and a preview of Ballad of the Sad Café when we go up to town to review art shows for TLS. Ordered four books from Bibliophile. Thursday 17: Early breakfast. Heard on radio: outbreak of hostilities in Gulf. Sudden US air attack on Saddam ...”

“... anonymous, he must be W.K.-L. Dickson, the pioneering filmmaker – Foden’s failure to name him may have something to do with the fact that he has an intimately described homosexual relationship with a soldier. To these men, and a subsidiary cast that includes ‘real’ people like General Sir George White, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, General Buller and ...”

“... humankind, and fruitility is what I call the fate which falls upon us all. Meaningless our lives may be but blessed with deep fruitility. It could take pages if I list all the joys of the fruitilitist: Retsina and grilled squid in Greece, that death-bed cut-out of Matisse I chanced on on a trip to Dallas, Sempre libera sung by Callas, love-making in the ...”

“... Earl of Hillsborough, to whom he dedicated his devastating satire, Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773). Satire was Franklin’s favourite way of delivering bad news to pompous officials. He had earlier proposed that, in exchange for British convicts being sent to America, the Colonial Governments should ship rattlesnakes back ...”

“... obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story’, and he may be right. What’s ultimately impressive about the book is not its half-assed PoMo comedy – which you can now find in virtually any novel of any genre, except possibly those published by Mills and Boon. Nor is it distinguished particularly for its skilful ...”

“... the skull of a man who has just been shot is compared to an ashtray on a café table. There may be a rather tiresome tendency to signpost impending plot revelations (Pankratov ‘seemed to possess some mighty secret’), and to favour telling over showing: ‘I knew immediately he was in love with her and that she knew it and despised every measure of ...”

“... where he works – or Tim O’Brien’s compelling Vietnam fragments, The Things They Carried. It may seem unfair to compare a first-time author unfavourably with various well-established names, but it’s also a backhanded compliment. There’s a thin line between being derivative and feeling your way with the help of like-minded precursors; just as it’s ...”

“... admitted by lottery. Another project, known as Paradise Beyond Paradise, is also mentioned; this may involve escaping into germ-free outer space. Unfortunately, a group led by Mr Moorcraft, the Head Engineer, has embezzled the funds for this project. Mr Moorcraft has now disappeared. No one asks how the conspirators could possibly have evaded the omnipresent ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”