“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to deal drugs. He claims to make £300 a day from this; I doubt if Sunny, tough though he may be, is tough enough to bring in that kind of money. He is already scared of boys who live in Ebony House, a special unit for young offenders, also in South London, and would have no chance fending them off if they got to hear of his £300 gold-mine. Sunny ...”

“... both been contested in recent times. First came a challenge to the notion of portrayal. Viewers may delight in the depiction of people and objects, but, so a new interpretation went, we were really meant to attend to the moral instruction offered. What you see is not what you ought to get. Is Dutch culture and its art a balancing act: the bountiful returns ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Shankill to bomb the innocent. He offered his sympathies to the injured, and the bereaved. ‘They may not want to accept them, and I understand that.’ I looked for the priest but I couldn’t see him. And then I could: over the heads of Mr McAllister and the people gathered at the grave, an elderly-looking man in a mackintosh was walking through the lines ...”

“... incidentally, the less they suggest the kind of Heart of Darkness-incarnate savagery that we may secretly yearn to ascribe to them. Toasting the engagement of the BBC’s man in the region, Roger Hearing, with a bottle of champagne which, a proud best man, I had resourcefully procured one night, I swallowed hard as he told me of witnessing killings at ...”

“... Imperial University, Infectious Disease Research Laboratory, Tokyo etc’ Extraordinary though it may seem, the activities of Unit 731 (and related outfits) were virtually unknown to most Japanese at least until 1976, when a Japanese television documentary was made on the subject. And the cat was only truly let out of the bag in 1982, with the publication of ...”

“... book as a vehicle for Oz’s morality, although it could perhaps do with a few more jokes. And it may be that the novel form is in principle a better instrument than the polemical essay through which to magnify the virtues of patience and moderation. At any rate, A Perfect Peace succeeds in presenting Oz’s own political case with a subtlety that is beyond ...”

“... thrown into prison for publishing an expurgated translation of La Terre. Dostoevsky, it appears, may not have been so much Dostoevskian as merely accurate. Growing up in Victorian Russia (Victorian by chronology, though hardly in spirit) must have been a strenuous training in the acceptance of contradictions – licence and deprivation, effeteness and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the best in poetry. In all the arts, there are broad movements which are inexorable. You may choose to swim against the tide, and perhaps do it very well, but you can’t turn it back; and English poets for half a century have mostly chosen to swim against what my hunch as a literary historian tells me will prove to have been the major tide of poetry ...”

“... too, and so extends Anglo-American cultural relations beyond the literary. Though, indeed, it may be said to have left ‘literature’ quite behind, his book seems to have influenced at least one work of the imagination. John Schlesinger’s film Yanks seems at times almost to be arranging its scenes so as to tick off chapters in Longmate (the rain, the ...”

“... the younger Mrs Castle is a little less prolix: the five and a half years from October 1964 to May 1970 rate only about half a million words – an average daily stint of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal with. Was it all worth it? Though anxious not to give Mrs Castle the ...”