“... pace until after the Second World War. Some of the desperation that fuelled his early writings may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another ...”

“... in the Comédie humaine is not without its dangers and induces a suspicion that Migne himself may not have existed in the normal sense. Worse still, a splendid photograph on the back flap shows the cigar-smoking author (who has also written a novel, Moses in the Promised Land) fly-fishing in the mountains, striking an epic, interrogative stance, as if ...”

“... a figure’ – a phrase Keats applies to Byron, and with something of the same distaste. Wolff may be in search of his identity, but he’s had his fill of figure-cutting, which is why he concludes the episode by refusing a dramatically appropriate gesture of revenge, the destruction of Landon’s prize porcelain bowl. In the title of this episode, ‘Old ...”

“... version of English, just as her Highland divertissement was an artistic version of a fling. In May 1925 she writes to him I took your key, read ¾ of Mrs Dalloway, it is very rapid, interesting, and yet I feel in that book all human beings only puppets. Virginia’s brain is so quick that sometimes her pen cannot catch it, or it is I who is slow. However ...”

“... very next chapter Marjorie rewards him from beyond the grave with £5000 and the Alfa. Try as he may, Benson can’t avoid falling for Greg as easily as Sadie; nor can he avoid making Marjorie into something a good deal worse than an old bat, a PLOP, or Plucky Old Person. Reading about her past, you realise she was doomed to become one; it is a past filled ...”

“... found the lost son. Somehow I have missed being found.’ But this kind of existential rhetoric may have been only the gin talking. Barry Paris makes it plain that somebody, somewhere, always did arrive in the nick of time to bale Brooks out. Always magnificently ungrateful, she would then scornfully retreat to the tried and tested company of ‘my beloved ...”

“... called either Theomania or Demonomania in the medical dictionary’. Faced with this suffering, we may find it hard to maintain that life’s a jest and all things show it. It is, of course, the puritanical direction of Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost that Berowne should tame his frivolity by attempting to ‘jest a twelvemonth in a ...”

“... spied on a sycamore leaf, meant a lot to him and to his powers of enquiry and composition. We may feel a sense of sadness and envy today at the possibilities in experience that seemed open to him – God, medicine, science, religion, travel, spirits and the supernatural. The universe, as Baudelaire was to say of the child in us all, seemed equal to his ...”

“... a Fordist and Post-Fordist economy. As the contributors admit, Fordist production processes may simply have shifted their locations, from the old heartland of capitalism to its peripheries. Furthermore, it is easy to exaggerate the differences between a Fordist and Post-Fordist work-force. The majority of those who work for Japanese industry in this ...”

“... progressive and he desired it in order to bolster socialism in Ireland, in spite of its source. It may have been the case that he wanted Ireland, in the throes of a nationalist revolution, to have an ally which would supply that same socially progressive influence. But the evidence, I believe, still points to Connolly’s at the very least subordinating his ...”

“... and hepped up the old Martin Luther King rhetoric to see the power of militant language. Jackson may be a self-advertising photo-opportunist, but he has the magic words, the political jive-talk, the rhetorical style, and with them he has simply rolled over black politicians whose claims were based on mere competence and practicality. South Africa could well ...”

“... Enright accepts that great art is ‘amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short of, which may even seek out, gratuitous ferocities’. Davie’s criticisms are of course reflected everywhere in Enright’s poetry itself, most obviously in its anxieties about the impotence of the liberal humanist. In ‘A Liberal Lost’, from The Old Adam ...”

“... year, later collected as Art and Society, he spelt this out: ‘The artistic process in general may be said to consist of two processes: the immediate and essential one which has always been known as inspiration, and which psychologically we describe as an access to the deeper layers of the unconscious; and a secondary process of elaboration, in which the ...”

“... There is a clear continuity between narrative and dialogue, as well as some hints that the novel may have an autobiographical basis. Eddie Hobson, the father, is the central figure. He is a sick and disillusioned ex-history teacher who is nursing some terrible secret hidden from, but endlessly guessed at by, the rest of his family. Eddie is, moreover, a ...”

“... to cancel itself out, to vanish up its own arsehole as he himself might have put it. That, too, may have been deliberate. His novels self-destruct on every page, consuming in their own energy like the schadenvoll German films of the period – Caligari or Mabuse. Even The Revenge for Love, arguably his masterpiece, and compared by Symons with Koestler’s ...”