“... generosity: it includes power, security, company. Who can say where and with what force jealousy may strike? The politics of the Left were those of people in a hurry who believed that a victory at the polls would mean a transformation of society. Under a Labour or a Communist government old vices would disappear. The most impatient, like Naomi’s brother ...”

“... bad name, and if Eastern Europe is a role model, the Russian people and the fragmenting republics may reject it altogether. On the other hand, I found, on my last visit in June, that many Russians were already fed up with perestroika and wanted only to find food in the shops. Many more said that things were better under Brezhnev. A radical deputy of the ...”

“... orchestra), impart their message without using scenery, require none of the trappings of theatre, may be either of a secular or sacred nature, and possess a certain level of intellectual and musical development.’ Leaving on one side vagueness – and the last phrase is very vague, like many other phrases in the book – there are other difficulties in this ...”

“... learning which Mosley outlined in one of his essays. The third level, he claimed, ‘is that which may be necessary for survival ... It is the chance for a man to see not just the patterns of his behaviour but also the patterns of his ability to see – and by this, not just to be free of patterns, but possibly to influence them.’ Hopeful Monsters finds the ...”

“... verse’). Larkin is named as Amis’s second-favourite poet (Housman is tops, though he may not have stayed tops, we suspect, if Amis had ever sat next to him at Trinity High Table), and as his ‘best friend’. Mysteriously, though, the pair of them seem rarely to have met: in thirty years, Larkin never invited Amis up to Hull – not even to look ...”

“... be reluctant to agree with the Reverend Sterne that ‘writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation’ – but much of the reason we relish the new novelists in English is that their experiences are not often our experiences, their way with our language not our way with their language. I’d ...”

“... Oxford’s spell, or under the spell of an Oxford he never quite managed to locate. The young Ved may have been a trifle gauche and smarmy but the old Mehta is quite proud of him. We hear of the boy’s lively debating skills, his conscientiousness, his charm, and we are left in no doubt that, after a somewhat shaky start, he was eventually moving in the ...”

“... ground: he seems neither likely to win an election nor to be an adventurous prime minister. This may be a misreading of him. He clearly has not been helped by having to propound the quasi-Treasury view that John Smith imposed on him. This is bad luck – but his recent attempts to recover lost ground have not been convincing. Margaret Beckett, though she has ...”

“... but enforcing, their new, ‘feudal’ rights over the lands of their leading subjects. Lawyers may have a weakness for tidying away messy realities, but they cannot generally create an intellectual model out of nothing, or force its adoption if it is too far out of step with contemporary norms. Reynolds meets the first point by arguing that the theory of ...”

“... more carnivalesque mood) in connection with ’68, whose beginnings he describes: not in May but in February, with the demonstration over Malraux’s sacking of Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque. (‘The battles with riot police were spiced with the saucy presence of Marlene Dietrich.’) However congenial and informative these two ...”

“... the intriguingly subversive suggestion that the formidable Catholic dévote, Madame de Maintenon, may have had a hand in composing L’Ecole des filles. Pornography knows no party-line, and is as much the preserve of aristocratic libertines as of zealous anti-court satirists. What are we to make of all those Restoration tributes to Charles II’s saucy ...”

“... flooded earlier in the summer, littering Surat with decaying garbage and animal carcases, which may have nurtured bacillus-carrying fleas. The local street-cleaners’ union demanded extra staff and new equipment to deal with the mess, but the municipal government refused to comply. In mid-September, a mysterious ‘Surat fever’ started to claim lives in ...”

“... and joined the rest of your kind, and in doing so have come closer to knowing me, beneath you as I may seem to be in my doggy ways.’ Tintin, for his part, apologises to his companion ‘for having been so unkind and arch with you in the past when you have swayed from duty or from even your normal stroll beside me to bound away after some lady dog’. After ...”

“... secret will be talked over by those men at their club in the public house tonight The admirers may be faithful, but these servants will not be. They know too much. Does the reader identify with the common pragmatism of servants, or with the more exalted ambitions of the characters they serve and observe? Robbins suggests that much of the novel’s rising ...”

“... not have the complete use of both arms. The reason I ask you what is the source of that is that it may well have had a determining effect on making you more bookish as a child.’ It is hard to know what is most grotesque about this: the initial attempt at charm, the question itself, or the discrepancy between the assumptions implicit in the question and the ...”