“... The narrator remembers his own flights from home, and fantasises about the dreams of freedom Dora may have had, ‘the illusion that the passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you’. But of course these are his thoughts, and he knows nothing of what Dora felt. He also knows, or ...”

“... after having talked for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself came to prefer the term ‘cultural poetics’, but ...”

“... take himself too seriously, and such excurses are mercifully brief, as is the book itself. ‘This may be the first short book on Napoleon,’ he comments (almost – Felix Markham’s classic 1954 Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe is even shorter). The problem is not that Martin occasionally loses himself in silliness, but that, like most of the ...”

“... flavour, but one easier to recognise than to describe. It also takes some getting used to, which may be why, I suppose, de Bernières had to wait until his fourth novel to become widely popular. I reviewed his first three novels for this journal, nine years ago, and recall my own bafflement. Take the opening paragraph of his first novel, and imagine coming ...”

“... real talent was as a novelist. Travel writing is, after all, travel writing, and though Craig may think well enough of it, Fontane’s historical books were the work of an especially perceptive and knowledgable amateur. The theatre reviews, too, are witty and thoughtful, but not extraordinary. (Lessing’s criticism, as Craig concedes, is a cut above ...”

“... seven, eight. But introduce Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest straight away. By the time they reach his childhood, it is a matter of genuine interest how he turned into the person that he is. So we’ll move backwards, in stages, tacking like a sailboat against the wind. Familiar time flow ...”

“... of the future had the status of science and the power to secure social stability. Methodologists may bicker about the appropriate weight to be given to accommodation and prediction; this chemist and administrator sought to make his world predictable, then based his authority on that achievement. Here Gordin’s unprecedentedly careful analysis of ...”

“... only to an enlightened elite who can be trusted to manage the affairs of the unenlightened. This may be what underlies the most striking feature of Schultz’s view of Sidgwick. For all his sympathy with much, perhaps most, of Sidgwick’s concerns and anxieties, Schultz very much dislikes the taken-for-granted imperialism and (on Schultz’s view at ...”

“... interested in stories for their own sake. She has returned to short stories after each novel, and may be more of a natural short-story writer than a novelist. Her novels are made up of incomplete fragments; different points of view. ‘Being Quick’ in The Whole Story and Other Stories describes a woman stranded on a broken-down train who decides to get off ...”

“... quite the right age,’ says the narrator of his first novel, Metroland (1980). ‘I mean, you may happen to think I’m rather immature’ – he’s in his early twenties – ‘but actually I often don’t feel quite at ease with the age I’ve got. Sometimes, in a funny sort of way, I long to be a sprightly 65.’ Barnes’s fiction seems to value old ...”

“... by celebrating the achievement of its inventor and the process of its invention. The battery may start with Volta but cannot end with him. Meaning stays in the hands of future users. Our own culture has recently found new fascination in stories of solitary men discovering how to make timepieces and maps, dyestuffs and bombs. Pancaldi’s work stands ...”

“... to GB84, with its scenes in triumphant Tory drawing-rooms and sense that the coalfields may as well be on Mars, also prefers to put Thatcher inside characters’ heads instead of on the page (except for one brief appearance). In both books, her power at its bullying peak is well conveyed. In GB84, at least at first, Scargill is not a much more ...”

“... more women had become authors: ‘Although the degree of control a husband exerted over his wife may not actually have been greater in the 18th century than during the early 17th century or the Restoration, the addition of the woman’s point of view on the subject … imparted to the discourse on marriage a new sense of crisis and individual ...”

“... No more wine? Then we’ll push back chairs and talk. A final glass for me, though. You may find a minor Byron here and there in Hunt, but that is the nearest you’ll get to the great Romantic poet proposed by Roe. In writing about the ‘first life’ of his subtitle, the life that ended with Shelley’s drowning the year after Keats was killed by ...”

“... for his father, a cobbler and smallholder. He published Ploughman and Other Poems in 1936 and in May 1937 moved to London, where he was commissioned to write an autobiography, The Green Fool. The book was well received, though a disparaging remark in it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s ...”