“... feats of giant-toppling! Disgrace / to the ancient Empire of Chlorophyll!’ This may simply be Reid wearing another mask, like Waugh late in life. But somewhere along the way, the inventive energy of his earlier work has given way to formal exercise, just as the ethic of making-it-strange, the ethic of Martianism, has given way to ...”

“... Lorna Wing explains why these sorts of phobia might arise: People with autistic disorders ... may be unaware of the boundaries between objects that to others seem so obvious ... They lack an internal structure for their lives. They need to have an external framework constructed for them by those who care for them and teach them. The most successful find ...”

“... of opening up, not a journey into the interior. Though people who speak at recovery meetings may tell compelling, cathartic narratives, these do not instantly qualify as literature. One of the most apposite of the 12-step slogans that walk the boundary between the trite and the profound could serve as this book’s epigraph: ‘You’re only as sick as ...”

“... and self-sacrifice. These were qualities traditionally associated with femininity. Women may be vanquished in her novels, but the feminine is triumphantly vindicated. Her varied and prolonged experience of male incompetence made Margaret Oliphant especially reluctant to cast men in the role of saviours. Her heroes (hardly the right word for the male ...”

“... or destroying capitalism, has for a century enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with it. Socialists may have begun by preaching the obsolescence of both capitalism and the nation, but in the course of time they discovered that ‘the fortunes of socialism were inexorably bound up with those of the [capitalist] nation within which it operated.’ This was ...”

“... from her brother in the Army. It is inconsequential and mean-minded, and Tindall suggests that it may only have been kept because it was the last surviving message from the boy. Her investigation of his life leads to the discovery of yet another brother, called Ursin. The mysteries surrounding both remain impenetrable, and at a certain point Tindall has to ...”

“... match Patton in the publicity stakes, and he was a very much duller man. For the British, Patton may have been a minor if spectacular figure in World War Two, significant only for his rivalry with Montgomery; but for many in the United States he remains the Great American Hero, who like all such heroes (including Rommel) was underrated and betrayed by an ...”

“... against the Spaniards in the West Indies, an expedition on which Drake died. Although Hawkins may not have blamed him, it has been suggested that Drake blamed himself, converting much of this powerful emotion into a still more bitter hatred for the Spaniards. At all events he conceived a huge, undying indignation against them which was probably his most ...”

“... Castro’s a dictator, he adds, and it’s healthy to oppose one’s government, whatever it may be. Jews and Mormons, he goes on to say, have taken over America and a lot of people will have to be exterminated for the planet to survive. He’s planning to make a speech tonight praising Hitler for stopping the growth of Communism. He recites a short poem ...”

“... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...”

“... it leaves one issue open, as does the rest of the Dayton Agreement. So wide open, in fact, that it may swallow up all the remaining good intentions contained in the deal. Nowhere is it established who will be responsible for the security or armed forces of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its two entities – nowhere, that is, except in the second part of the Military ...”

“... unit of meaning but as part of a dynamic, a structure of writing whose actual purpose and effect may be at odds with what it appears to express. What matters in this structure is the dynamic of address, the space of writing, the distance between the correspondents, not the message or the individual. Kaufmann studies Kafka’s letters to Felice ...”

“... offer. At first he could judge his new world only by standards of provincial gentility. ‘You may wonder if I am meeting the right kind of friends over here,’ he wrote, a few months after his arrival in Paris. ‘Well, I am tremendously lucky as by some means or other I have met only the really nice people who figure very high in society over ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What’s interesting about ‘red is warmer than green’ is something quite different; viz that (may be) it can be true for me but false for you; or (maybe) there’s no matter of fact at all about whether it’s true. There’s certainly a matter of fact about whether it’s raining; so what on earth does whether a representation is indexical have to do ...”