“... in the new fast plane with which the unit was equipped, the Bloch 174, but it was not until 22 May, well after the German offensive had begun, that he was sent out over Arras with an escort of five Dewoitine fighters. Cloud forced them to fly low and they were scarcely in sight of the blazing town before they ran into anti-aircraft fire and six ...”

“... radical politics but the category of politics as such, and from Burke to Scruton (if small things may be compared with great) they seek to oust it with instinct, tradition, unreflective habit. Yeats was the major architect of this project in Fin-de-Siècle Ireland, a kind of Hibernian Arnoldianism which is still alive if unwell today among the liberal ...”

“... all in their proper places. Such idealism is hardly appropriate for a novelist, no matter how he may feed on the negative consequences of its failure. Yet people evidently entered Waugh’s emotional life from time to time (at least up to the time of his second marriage) about whom his novels could not, and could never have had, anything to say. In the bleak ...”

“... book in the Spectator, ‘quarrelled as much as they did.’ He knows, he was there. But it may be that in Connolly’s case quarrelling was a natural extension of his endless capacity for self-pity. As for his wife, it was one of the things she did best, in life and in art. When Connolly was complaining about her to Edmund Wilson, he told him that she ...”

“... speaking alone. ‘About that metaphor, the military one,’ she concludes, ‘I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers.’ A virtuoso landing, and the virtuosity is what counts; we register the skill of the closure, and the highly-placed, controlling presence of the writer. No bibliography follows, although the bookshelf in ...”

“... Wives, Afford no Subject for the Muse than Mirth ... Amusements, Pleasures, Comforts, Days of Joy May a Man’s Mind, but not his Muse, employ; Crabbe characteristically turns the problem from ethics to poetics. Crabbe postulates a chiaroscuro of happiness and sorrow, but he takes disaster as a poetical device which will illuminate the whole field of ...”

“... Confederate widow has lived for more than ninety years. A first-person narrator – ‘My English may be ugly as a mud fence but I know what a story is,’ she boasts – Lucy Marsden tells her story, and many other people’s stories, to an anonymous listener equipped with a tape-recorder. The garrulous old lady’s Carolina brogue is not wholly ...”

“... by a systematic exclusion of blacks, women and migrants. Miles Franklin’s underlying vision may not differ all that much from the one contained in the celebrated final volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia, subtitled The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green, which shows what ‘grovelling’ to the British did for Australia between 1915 and ...”

“... confess to ignorance about the mood of ordinary citizens in August 1914. Those who marched to war may also have had illusions, but these were soon brutally shattered. How did they cope, why did they continue, what did it all mean to them, what did it do to their patriotism, their religion, their views about authority, their politics and social or class ...”

“... three times, each from the perspective of a different history and set of cultural traditions, and may be followed through the three books cross-wise, if you wish. The ‘ancient’ texts are organised according to the antiquarian interests of the 17th century. As in The Arabian Nights, an exiguous narrative set in the present day is interwoven throughout the ...”

“... belatedly proclaimed, of the European past. This last point, on which Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they ...”

“... for the gathering who are now getting ready to return to real office life where ultimate abandon may not be easy to come by. Still, over the final coffee a man from Ciba-Geigy (‘I am a kind of writer. I write ideas in my office and then send them out to be implemented’) feels he has had a thrilling and rare experience. Where else, he asks, can you hear ...”

“... then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress last fall and may lose them the White House next year.So the language of therapy and recovery is kicking in, if anything so bland and superficial can be said to have any kick at all. The words ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’ are never employed – perhaps from some exaggerated ...”

“... of the mystery-meets-matter tensions of Ralegh’s own, begins in the Twenties. Checking out what may actually lie at the spot where Ralegh’s chart places the wriggling ‘creature’ of the title (the mythic lake of Manoa on which El Dorado was supposed to stand), Nicholl found Angel Falls – named for Jimmy Angel, the bush-pilot who should, from his ...”

“... She sounded so like oneself, and yet she was dead, which gave her a necessary gravitas. She may have personified the Holocaust for millions of adults – the diary is the most widely read non-fiction book after the Bible – but for me, aged 12 or 13, she simply told the story of what it is like to be 12 or 13 in a world where no one seems to be ...”