“... or Mr Pooter. So, it is not surprising that some have suspected that his memoir is a hoax. We may more safely suppose that he was a genuine person, striving to be candid against all the odds. We leave him running a sex education class for the local youngsters, ‘calling a spade a spade’, against the local vicar’s advice. Witter Bynner is a more wily ...”

“... weeping over his ‘sordid lust’); and separation, ultimately, from his class, which he suspects may regard him as a panderer to ‘the likes of them’, the middle classes, whose property poetry is and for whom he has become a busker, flat cap in hand. Like some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, Continuous celebrates language while recognising that to acquire it ...”

“... signature is a notation by a Council member: ‘Let him look closer to home for such favour as may be granted him.’ This is chilling. But most often, of course, the records are not only dull but difficult to interpret. ‘Do the two documents refer to the same Miguel de Cervantes?’ asks Byron at one point. ‘Probably they do,’ he replies, but we are ...”

“... for the lost glories of Fulton, and never even asks whether the civil servants who buried it may have been right. Yet one of the few clear lessons of the last twenty years is that that sort of 1960s scientism is nonsense, that the ‘cult of the generalist’ is much less dangerous than the ‘cult of the specialist’ and that the notion of a ...”

“... in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how the Russians may have felt. They thought they would ‘sort out’ the Afghans in a matter of a couple of months. Alas, Muscovites and Byelo-Russians can no more sort out the internecine complexities of Afghan tribal, family and personal history in a few weeks than English ...”

“... what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain amount of ballast) is here in The Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. It is the record of a man magnificently and unabashedly out ...”

“... a challenge shared by both historians and anthropologists. Even if Clendinnen’s interpretation may not command universal assent, it will certainly enjoy a wide readership and elicit vigorous debate. It sent me scurrying back to Sahagun, Bernal Diaz, and other 16th-century chronicles which offer such a profusion of data on so many aspects of Mexica history ...”

“... and rebukes his earlier stuff as ‘too literary, too full of its own cleverness’. Auster may be shaking his head at his own earlier work here, as where he notes that Sachs’s novel sometimes ‘feels too constructed, too mechanical in its orchestration of events, and only rarely do any of the characters come fully to life.’ If so, he’s unduly ...”

“... certainly nothing worthy (thank God, some will say) of being called an ideology. We believe (which may be too strong a word) that society, made up of individuals, isn’t wholly ‘godless’, albeit we would be hard-pressed to name any working god or list that god’s attributes. Maybe we are not as simple-minded as the ideologies we have given birth to, the ...”

“... taught at University College London, and is currently a visiting lecturer at Kyoto University – may be partly responsible for these instabilities of setting. More important, though, is his technique of moving between one perspective or voice and another. Free indirect speech is a key method in this context, and in their use of it Ford’s poems have ...”

“... of demonstrators in cat-masks gathers outside the house of a Permanent Under-Secretary (‘A cat may look at a king ...’). In Hilary he has met his match, and, after making love to her over one of the office desks, he begins experiencing fatherly feelings. He is, anyway, old enough to be her father, whom she has never known. Soon Hilary is being mothered ...”

“... with ideas about where knowledge is to be found. They stand up to the men as bravely as they may, bowing before the storm but not breaking, while the men bluster, bemoan, strike out, or sulk. It is not that they are shallow, nor that they are sweetened or sentimentalised; they know the depths, they are more modest in assessing the attainable heights and ...”

“... He was described by one mistress as greeting the climax with a great hoot of laughter. That may be the key to him: a lover laughing out loud, a financier vastly preferring journalism, a Canadian Presbyterian with a sense of humour – all terrifying ...”

“... prose deadpan. Tess Gallagher says she suggested to Altman that he restrain his irony, but he may have taken the hint a bit too far. ‘Ray never raised himself above the plights of his characters,’ Gallagher tells us she told Altman. Well, no, but he never treated the plights of his characters as just one of those things either, and still less as just ...”

“... family had converted to Catholicism, and who was deeply influenced by Anglicanism at Cambridge – may be invoked only after all suspicion of hypocrisy has been eliminated, and at the cost of sacrificing every thing else. The differences between these three great poets are more numerous and significant than their similarities; but Stern’s achievement is to ...”