“... the Guardian and Granada journalists looked glum. The former MP (he lost his safe seat in the May landslide) was lying all right, but he was lying with such charm, verve and enthusiasm that he looked and sounded like a winner. The case seemed lost. The dramatic story of how Aitken was finally defeated by his own lies is superbly set out in the final ...”

“... hate you, you fucking anti-feminist bitch’ is about the most printable. Angry young men may have been the first Netizens, but the medium obviously offers women a safe and irresistible outlet for verbal violence. These days, I’m also getting hate mail from radical graduate students who don’t like what I write, as this year’s president, in my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it back and the other half throwing it up. This leaves Belfast facing a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never enjoyed a good press (although Joyce, oddly, claimed to like it). As hardened a traveller as Paul Theroux emerged wild-eyed and spluttering: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city ... demented and sick ... a ...”

“... of typically idiosyncratic anarchism. He dies. It was an extreme sort of v-sign but the reader may come to feel Katz deserved it. The author’s certainty of his own importance to the Fassbinder story is such that he forces us to witness his book’s moment of creative inspiration. You would tend not to ask a biographer where he got the idea for a project ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... now in a Bill put forward by an all-party commission, don’t become law. And it seems they may not. There was no big gathering at Oventic because the people are full of foreboding and out of patience. The Government has stalled for months, concerned with a more pressing war within the decaying PRI itself: as right and left opposition groups gain ground ...”