“... as it was for Beckett. All of his fictional protagonists are humbled and defeated; and while this may be arraigned as unduly pessimistic, it was not the view of the world they taught at Eton. Besides, as Hitchens himself has insisted (ironically enough in light of his own recent changes of political heart), Orwell really did remain on the Left, despite his ...”

“... grand-children? When the legal barriers are lifted and the violence suppressed, some sort of hope may return, opportunities may open up, and after a generation or two there may be some success stories. But the situation is not as it was before the injustice or as it would have been had ...”

“... the men strong and in fighting mood’. The victims of rape are usually reluctant to speak out and may be accused of betrayal and rejected by their peers and their families. Those who bear the children of the enemy are stigmatised, even ostracised. Some contract Aids or other sexually transmitted diseases; all experience physical and psychological ...”

“... which, in their different ways, Freud and Peter Gay have made their own, sheer bulk of documents may to some extent compensate for this difficulty. In the 17th century, the problem of psychological interpretation is altogether more intractable. That 17th-century characters had psychologies, as much as any later characters, ...”

“... of your devotion as you have been of mine.’ Auberon explains: ‘I do not think, as others may decide, that the ... sentence was intended ironically. Or at any rate, not very ironically. It certainly was not intended as an embittered father’s curse.’ Well, he should know – except that, on the matter of his dad, Auberon Waugh is not the most ...”

“... around’ and ask why the state ‘condones life support’ for it, especially when prosecution may generate the glamour of martyrdom. It’s true that there has for many years been a web of statutes prescribing sentences up to life imprisonment for disclosing official secrets and for unauthorised possession of firearms and explosives. There is legislation ...”

“... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...”

“... other hand, it has many unfamiliar photographs (not counting stills), and any photograph of Garbo may seem worth having. Besides, its preposterousness evokes – far better than a cleverer book like, say, What makes Sammy run – the dream landscape that stretched all the way from Hollywood to UFA in Berlin and Svensk Filmindustri in Stockholm. So much for ...”

“... that Raban’s boat could not possibly have survived to let him tell the tale) I might choose Richard Hughes on hurricanes, but for all less overwhelming though still astonishing manifestations of troubled water Raban must surely be the man. Auden wrote about ‘the pluck and knock of the tide’, which is a good but tersely elementary way of talking ...”

“... the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller class consists mainly of those in the creative arts whose careers stickily attract phrases like ‘he never married, being a homosexual,’ ‘not always faithful’, ‘his amorous ...”

“... in the limited sense of the person who put the words on the page.’ Abominating what we may call the ‘ET’ heresy (Extra-Textuality), our authors (or should we say abstractions?) flee the referent for the signifier, and embark upon their philological odyssey through the ‘texts’. The ‘author’, once patriarch of literary property, having ...”

“... Party officials, NKVD officers, a scatter of little people keeping their heads down as best they may. Chonkin is no wily Yossarian figure: he is an innocent, and so is his Nyurka. So, strangely enough, are some of the other characters, even among the least sympathetic. Degraded as their lives and actions are, we are made to feel that they have been caught up ...”

“... definition of the ‘better sort’, to which national, as well as local, economic change may have contributed. Yet in Havering, as in the country, the clearest change seems to be, not a rise or fall in any class, but an increase in the numbers of gentry. Here Havering seems to caricature the national trend. In 1570 to 1590, there were 24 to 25 ...”

“... the track’s safety systems had been contracted out, in contrast to the usual practice, which may have resulted in the lack of padding on the column the victim collided with at turn 16. But Petroski also suggests that financial gain shaped the design. He quotes from a post-mortem in the Wall Street Journal: ‘The course’s dangers became part of its ...”

“... In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking ...”