“... me, for no good reason, of those in The Turn of the Screw.) In such a flat account, though, it may seem rather unctuously moral. This is avoided, in part, through the elegant deliberation of Jacobson’s style, with the occasional use of words like ‘indocile’ and ‘delation’ to give savour to the story’s simplicity, but also because the tale is ...”

“... His thesis is that it was only monetarist writers such as Peter Jay in a famous Times article of May 1973 who foresaw that ‘the boom [would have to] go bust’ and Professors Laidler and Parkin, writing in June 1974, who foresaw that as a result of the rapid growth of the money supply in 1972-3 inflation would reach 20 per cent in 1974 and 1975. This is at ...”

“... two won’t let the other play any more. Glover is the boy who was left out in the cold, which may be felt to colour his version of events. If he’d chosen to reveal in 1989 what he chooses to reveal now about himself and his co-founders Matthew Symonds and Andreas Whittam-Smith he might have found recruits hard to come by. Comparing his book with my own ...”

“... deal of dignity, and acts as an able critic of human ‘overcapacity in the brain box’ which may account for our self-destructive goings on. And there is some real fun to be had out of the three men in the boat, the Alice pastiche, and the way it’s played off against the dubiously real world of the early Nineties. The Victorian FitzRoy is done with ...”

“... his turf from raiders from outside. There are signs here and there, however, that things may be changing. Harvard has long run a very successful and high-powered history and literature programme for undergraduates, as does Oxford, which is also just embarking on a similar marriage of history and art history. The barriers between scientific ...”

“... up a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from salt and frozen drops of water. They may last for four hours or two days. Such lyrical yet precise descriptions are characteristic of Høeg’s half-Western, half-Inuit protagonist. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, Smilla has a mind of winter: or, as it states in her Danish police report, ‘anybody ...”

“... even.’ If the book fails to deliver on its weightier promises, seldom rising above exotica, this may have to do with the constant sense we have that Hickman will not, after all, countenance risk or change to herself. Despite her blithely loopy ability to accommodate Mexican reality to the ready-made parameters of magical realism, she is far too sane for the ...”

“... Had we done something, our son would still be with us.’ The man spoke for the first time. ‘You may want to know why I haven’t complained about my son’s disappearance.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not our business to dig into such personal matters.’ ‘I’ll tell you, though. I’m a colonel in the Argentinian army ... I will appreciate your ...”

“... act, as they often do, as a means for a non-person to cling onto his identity. To be an individual may be the most coveted right of all. There is a particularly touching passage – this book is notable for its expert changes of tone – when Popov and a friend of his watch Brezhnev’s cortège entering Red Square. They feel themselves lucky to be so close ...”

“... it only remains for a superlatively youthful Minister for the Draft to be appointed, although it may be objected that after Lord Young has completed his overhaul of the YTS, such an appointment will be unnecessary. Another irony concerns the improved standing of Burchill herself, and her unmistakable debt to Mrs Thatcher. Indeed the punk whose existence once ...”

“... is the rule – what Ms Ang describes as ‘the position of permanent expectation’. This may turn the characters, and the audiences, into nervous wrecks (‘After a tenth of that stress I would be lying in a psychiatric hospital,’ said a ‘well-known Dutch doctor’): very rarely does it make them corpses. Here the heroes are only removed when ...”

“... bores prepared to bang on interminably provided they get in on the act, whatever the act may be? ‘A son killing his mother,’ one of them says, ‘is Greek Tragedy, but this is worse – much much worse.’ Yes much much worse. As literature, that is – or perhaps one should say as reading matter. Reviewing Peter Manso’s Mailer, Elizabeth ...”

“... the extraordinary childrearing procedures to which she was subjected. Yet even if a shipwreck may sometimes be salutary for those who survive it, it is not an experience to be indulged in if it can be avoided. Catherine’s upbringing does not provide a model for others. Bateson’s handling of the Freeman affair is much more stylish than Howard’s, and ...”

“... Jean Shrimpton, and lived with her for several years. I assume that this item of personal history may be mentioned without impertinence, because Heathcote has published, next to a mutilated photograph of Jean, a virulent exercise in loathing called Polythene Pam which rivals Céline’s lunatic ravings against the Jews in its intemperate nastiness. It is ...”

“... adjures them to flee the contamination of the undecided as well as the sceptical. It may have been too easy to applaud as an attack on America Miss Stead’s insight into the tradition of individualism, which in Sam tips so effortlessly into fascism, and which, as Rosalind Mitchison once put it, could mean permissiveness, but ‘could also mean ...”