“... in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages ...”

“... or Thailand into the compass of student travellers. Paradoxically the plane’s very size may well have helped to conquer many people’s fear of flying by allowing them to cross the world in a flying building rather than a dubious jet-propelled cylinder. In any case, shifting twice as many passengers as any air craft that preceded it, and as fast as ...”

“... on his musical language, and more far-reaching effects on his forms. The effect of Beethoven may have declined in the 1850s, the period of The Trojans, but Gluck re-emerges as a first and last love; Berlioz supervised his works in performance and inspired the superb editions of the 1870s. Still in Chapter 13, I am unconvinced by Cairns’s aesthetic ...”

“... civilisation. Presently he was attacked in the street, and knocked unconscious, by two youths, who may have decided he was a foreigner. They were engaged in throwing him over the parapet of a bridge when the Police intervened. Whereupon they attacked the Police. The other evening the same youths, apparently, were interviewed on television by a kindly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... speculates that ‘her good relations with the USSR did not escape notice,’ and thinks that she may have been ‘gotten rid of’ as a security risk because of her good relations at the same time with John and Robert Kennedy. He has dinner at Nelson Rockefeller’s New York apartment, but assures his Soviet readers that he sat amid the opulence thinking of ...”

“... not all forest but is largely made up of human bodies – and not the adumbrations of bodies that may be found in a Forest by Ernst, but palpable flesh and muscle and bone and at the top right an agonised head thrown back. These straining, densely-muscled trunks and limbs locked in a Herculean struggle could well be an allusion, which I cannot yet ...”

“... zoo, or theme park, in which to display them as shudder-inducing Dickensian chimeras. That may come. For the time being we condone, with a nod and a wink, what can only be called a policy of unauthorised culling. Clean-handed collaborators, we are able to mime our horror at each freak example that finds its way onto the inside pages of provincial ...”

“... Watsonville is at the head of the most productive vegetable-growing area in the world. Between May and October each year, as the mists roll in from the Pacific, the area produces about 80 per cent of the fresh vegetables consumed in the United States. But for the past ten years, as the seasons passed by, economic pressures have been building towards ...”

“... Thatcher Front Bench, had hinted at prime ministerial megalomania in a Weekend World interview in May 1986, Ingham summoned the Lobby and instructed them that Biffen, then Leader of the House of Commons, was an un-person. The phrase employed was ‘semi-detached’. In the next day’s Times: ‘The sources said that Mr Biffen was a “semi-detached member 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”