“... known physical world, shared and chorally spoken for. In such a world even the hardest daily tasks may be welcomed, for there is ‘nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past’. It is with the sudden and inescapable eruptions of the past into the present, however, and with the capacities of people to live with and ...”

“... of the like excursion, or mutation ... nor shall the ages in future see the like. It may justly be doubted and in an Astrologicall way divined, that there shall be a sensible disturbance, if not a finall subversion.’ Lilly deftly connects the heavenly cataclysms with those below: ‘I say this Conjunction findeth [King Charles] engaged in an ...”

“... was (and is) much less clear. Oddly for an historian, he never stops to consider that Mafia may have changed. Pino Arlacchi told me recently that he used to take the line that Duggan does in the book – that Mafia as an organisation does not exist – but does so no longer. He accepts that Duggan is right for the period up to the 1950s, but after that ...”

“... or the buttocks of a pubescent baby-sitter. Alcohol was rarely described in Klegg’s work, and he may himself not have recognised it as the element which kept his world in perpetual centrifugal motion. This funny, ungenerous evocation of the ‘American Kafka’ is surely a version of Raymond Carver, the ‘American Chekhov’, as transmogrified by ...”

“... and grandchildren, and says she had a son who was a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid she may not be believed. And indeed there are some who do not believe her.’ It is a Chekhov ending, like that of another late story, ‘Three Years’, in which after a terrible time at home the rebellious young girl Nadya ‘in a lively cheerful mood left the ...”

“... unexpectedly antagonistic couple, is comic, but also dangerous: any of the four characters may, at any time, lose all self-possession. As Avram says: ‘It’s incredible. No one has thrown anything.’ In these early stories, the reader, safely out of range of hurled objects, contemplates characters who consider themselves masters of their ...”

“... accidental meeting with his daughter, who has not (as he supposes) come to see him. Remittance men may not have disappeared off the face of the earth, but they are no longer commonly found in fiction. An interview between a man and his wife’s lover about arrangements for the separation leads to a moment of self-discovery which takes its force from the ...”

“... in Finland, sounds rather boringly British. William, too, was English in his own way, which may have been one of the things about him that Evelyn Waugh admired. He borrowed from him too. In this highly fascinating and erudite biography Dido Davies notes some of the echoes of Jazz and Jasper in Vile Bodies. Gerhardie’s Lord Ottercove, based on the ...”

“... It is pointless to guess at the future when events press so hard and when, within a year or so, we may know whether Malan’s vision is true. Twenty years ago – it is also relevant to recall – the sociologist Heribert Adam put up the theory that the Afrikaners had an unacknowledged genius for pragmatic flexibility: far from being ideological ...”

“... the puzzling comment: ‘Nothing is lost by guesswork except the author’s own touch.’ Kalstone may be a little easygoing at times in the conduct of his argument, but he’s never as laid-back as that! What has been lost, most regrettably, is a resolution of themes taken up and developed in an occasionally rather loose and loquacious way throughout the ...”

“... chapter on comparative cleanliness which ends with the judgment that ‘France and England may be ranked amongst the tolerably clean nations, England taking the lead: but real cleanliness is not general in either ... The majority prefer a modest degree of dirtiness as being more conducive to their true comfort.’ There is a mass of later secondary ...”

“... sums it up nicely: the villagers, he says, were ‘vainly attempting to restore a lost world which may never have existed’. The economic aspects of that struggle we are better able to understand, in all their complexity, after reading this book. What we are still no better able to understand is the sort of thing that happened at Datchet, near Windsor, in ...”

“... because I am as useless at fairy time as I would be at computing a dictionary; and anyway, he may have had in mind all those volunteer readers and their helpful slips, for large fairies, if, unlike bugganes, benevolent, sometimes do the housework.The Random House Dictionary †, which turns up at the same time as the second edition of the OED, is in a ...”

“... reader of The Idiot knew that there was such a person and that he was telling them. We may now wonder whether or not Dostoevsky’s mania for gambling, his constant in debtedness, his quarrels with Turgenev and his humiliating need to beg for money were common knowledge: whether, that is, the biographical aura is as intrinsic a part of The Gambler ...”

“... uncontrolled fantasies dreamed up by Roberto as he lives out the last days of his isolation. It may be that the final disappointment of The Island of the Day Before lies in precisely this wilful blurring of fictional levels. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the reader’s dawning awareness that all the bizarre conspiracies encountered by the protagonists were, in ...”