“... says, ‘we are engaged in a type of dreaming. Each gaze that falls upon an object of interest may yield a moment’s reverie.’ It is, he thinks, important that we don’t know the names of all the buildings, don’t know their history – just as it is important on a country walk that we don’t know the names of all the trees, flowers and geological ...”

“... of teenagers was likely to be disrupted by the police. However ‘phobic’ policies and laws may be in the United States, constitutional rights there would make such intervention illegal. Minton also points out that every legislative restraint to public freedom is fiercely contested in the States. Here restrictions have often been slipped in with minimal ...”

“... three women gives animation to a few pages of Challenge, but though Orlando and Broderie anglaise may be enriched by their autobiographical subtext they don’t depend on it for their continuing lives. Both books, one a brilliant and original fantasy, the other a sophisticated and percipient comedy, gain a new layer of interest from the ...”

“... now seem almost ordinary: Sure, he towelled, if it is this fair way that answers up to you, you may dismiss the vowels because one does not remember the yak that does not immediately remember one. One does not scan the roads for politeness or contribute to the desert economy. And lo what he said became true for everyone on earth and there was no parallel ...”

“... a peasant nation like France, it is better to have someone whose origins, modest though they may be, lie deep in the entrails of our soil, rather than a subtle Talmudist.’ During the war Blum was imprisoned, first in France, then at Buchenwald and Dachau. He died in 1950. Birnbaum, a well-known historian and sociologist of French Jewry, has written a ...”

“... edition rather than Caxton’s; Reynard was also the subject of magic-lantern slides. The fox may have migrated to America, and disguised himself as Br’er Rabbit; more than a dozen episodes from the Uncle Remus stories are lifted from the Roman de Renart and the Reynaert de Vos. (Though one wouldn’t want to give Reynard credit for everything: Br’er ...”

“... As for the Odyssey, ‘he hadn’t bothered to read’ it, though Chaudhuri clearly has. There may be much that is autobiographical in the novel: Chaudhuri, like his Telemachus/Stephen Dedalus figure, was a student in London in the 1980s. But there’s enough distance for the writer to see the character with a balance of ironic detachment and ...”

“... the pro-Union vote was divided among Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and, strange as it may seem, the SNP, which downplayed any talk of independence and masqueraded instead as Authentic Old Labour. Under normal circumstances, the SNP would have interpreted its 56-seat triumph as a mandate to negotiate independence. But at the current juncture, in ...”

“... that pop into your head. Does that sound pretentious?’ Giving four answers and a qualification may have been characteristic: ‘We haven’t got a message really; the lyrics are open to interpretation. They’re multi-dimensional. You can read into them whatever you like. Obviously they’re important to the band.’ These sentences aren’t the usual ...”

“... revolutions … which we can meet with in ancient or modern history’. Burke agreed: ‘The Court may assume as uncontrolled a power in this country as the king of Sweden has done in his.’ Might George III become another Gustavus III? Although Burke ended up an enemy of popular revolt, he spent much of his life in politics as the foe of prerogative. Bourke ...”

“... career to his family. Deep though his revulsion at having to hand over a man for possible torture may have been, it remained a private ...”

“... author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules’.3 That ‘potential’ may be the very condition of language becomes hard to ignore when you start thinking even a little about translation, a fact made vivid in Perec’s efforts at getting his friend Mathews’s work into French. After becoming hooked on Mathews’s first novel, The ...”

“... hatreds, alliances between siblings have framed economic and cultural life for centuries. But this may be changing. Used to exercising consumer choice in all circumstances, younger people are (we’re told) increasingly likely to spend time with their friends, rather than sticking to siblings. The supply of brothers and sisters has also shrunk. Contraception ...”

“... wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ‘torrenting’, ‘blasting’, ‘hot-rocking’ or ‘up-skirting’. People hang out at Porkies (a restaurant), Jester (a ...”

“... ten of wax or smoke. If book historians have gravitated towards tear-jerkers and pornography, it may be because both produce a somatic response. Scholars from various disciplines share the urge to match a mental process with material measurements: in 1988, Victor Nell’s Lost in a Book measured readers’ responses by means of salivation ...”