“... like the late Adolf. They’re racists, but more shamefaced about it than the late Adolf.’ They may be doing some of these things, but they’re certainly not doing them ‘like the late Adolf’. If the comparisons are to be made at all, they must be made with tact, as they were by R.W. Johnson in this paper some months ago. Comfort has succeeded in ...”

“... the first winds, of a new civilisation, or at least of what I’m calling ‘cultural space’, may rise – if we work hard enough at it. So from this stony house, this cosmopoetic observatory, lined with a thousand books, my Atlantic salutations. Till the next time ...”

“... 1939 by-election, but since he gets the name of the winner (and his precedessor) wrong, his memory may be at fault. Wilson’s shift to Labour came, I would suspect, later, during the war, as he watched Labour rising high in the polls and the popular imagination. His career in Parliament from 1945 to 1964 picked a careful path through the shifting fortunes of ...”

“... book would no doubt be successful: more so, perhaps, than the one Tama Janowitz has written, which may explain why her publishers have pushed it out front. But seekers after cheap thrills are going to be disappointed. Sex and violence are almost eerily absent from Slaves, and so far from ‘caring less’, the characters who haunt its pages care obsessively ...”

“... practices does not play a prominent role in his account of how societies evolve. This stance may derive from the radical distinction drawn in the first volume of his Treatise between social explanation and the more interpretative sort of enquiry he terms description. However, at times one feels that his account of social stratification and change might ...”

“... Leave Coincided with Kit Inspection’, enclosing it with a note to the Bombardier, hoping it ‘may bring fruit in due season’. ‘I think there must be something wrong with Bob Robertson,’ he reflects anxiously. ‘Yesterday evening I discovered that he keeps photographs of upwards of twenty women in his bedroom, none of the women having the slightest ...”

“... coupling of a general syllabus malaise with the rigour of its Medieval component – may be related. As Wormald says at the head of the first chapter: ‘The country in which this book was conceived, and the literary language in which it was written, are both more than a thousand years old.’ None of this has halted the British tendency to sell ...”

“... Democrats should in turn have sought for a way to torpedo his personal reputation. Thomas may well turn out to be an able as well as a worthy man, and a good Supreme Court judge. But the manner of his appointment made it virtually impossible for him to seem anything other than George Bush’s token black, a beneficiary yet again of affirmative ...”

“... It would certainly be decorous to do so. But silences, as feminists and others have shown, may constitute the most significant meaning of a text. Jane Miller’s husband makes a brief appearance on the acknowledgments page of this book, but scarcely otherwise. Yet it is hard to imagine that Karl Miller’s presence played no part in the pilgrimage of ...”

“... efforts had earned him the Newdigate Prize. John James Ruskin indulges the hope that Ruskin ‘may, if spared, become a full grown poet’. Kemp expatiates: ‘The phrase “if spared” – neither pampered with praise nor intimidated with harsh criticism – shows the antiquated view that Ruskin’s parents, and also literary Oxford, held about what goes ...”

“... risk, Gordon Burn has turned over the furniture of modern iconography – ironically his book may well consolidate the phenomenon it seeks to condemn. Alma Cogan tears off celebrity’s mask and examines what lurks beneath: not the fear of being forgotten, but the dread of not being allowed to ...”

“... the focus to what didn’t or couldn’t happen. Access to the mysteries of composition in a novel may strike the reader as a bold experiment in form or just a steal from Milan Kundera’s notebook: either way, it stalls the rhythm of this book. You get a layout of scaffolding, the foundations, the architect’s designs, but you don’t take away any ...”

“... project will go ahead. Moreover, Britain’s role in political terms is to be increased. In May 1991, Nato’s Defence Planning Committee announced its new force structure, with emphasis on reaction forces ‘available at short notice to provide an early military response to a crisis and, if necessary to contribute to defence’, and on multinationality ...”

“... of the contributors to Introducing Don DeLillo exercise themselves about Will's remarks, which may have had some effect on DeLillo himself, in turning him towards the concerns which animate Mao II; l’affaire Rushdie, as well as the Salinger photograph, has been acknowledged by DeLillo as an influence on the book. Mao II’s subject is handily summarised ...”

“... Even readers who find the sentimentality of Murillo’s images of street arabs difficult to accept may be convinced by Brown’s account of the merits of, say, the moving yet dignified Return of the Prodigal Son, originally painted for the Hospital of Charity of Seville and now to be seen in the National Gallery, Washington. Brown goes so far as to claim that ...”