“... puzzlement or blankness can be her only response. She has immense physical resilience and self-confidence, an alarming urge to dominate, and a combative and powerful presence. But she is also uninformed, endlessly self-deceived and, though by no means unintelligent, seemingly incapable of intellectual reflection or ...”

“... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on ...”

“... It’s not a disaster, far from it. It’s a lumpy, unequal, slow-moving book, more than a little self-congratulatory, but it refuses, with its returning hero Yossarian, to treat death with the respect that is due to life, and it is often very funny. The first voice we hear is that of Sammy Singer, the (in Catch-22) unnamed ‘small tail gunner’ who kept ...”

“... digging up the pasts of their own living parents, most star-struck imitators of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford would probably draw the line. The difficulty, of course, is that both Albert and Sylvia Bernstein had a secret that they desperately wanted to preserve. Some time between 1940 and 1942 – even their son cannot be specific about dates – they had ...”

“... aspire to be) junkies, the damage that anorexic and beautiful models inflict on the consumer’s self-image and, on the other hand, the social progress fashion is making by giving stylistic space to those not usually represented in ads. There is comparatively little discussion of the self-esteem or health of the workers ...”

“... 15 of his 53 years as a tinplate worker, and six more (and very valuable ones they were for his self-education) immured in Dorchester Jail. This is a well-researched and notably sympathetic study of a difficult man. Its limitations are partly due to Wiener’s narrow focus and partly inseparable from his hero. Apart from his publicist ventures in the late ...”

“... route, Peter Redgrove has arrived back at a very ancient place: or at any rate, a place that Robert Graves unearthed in The White Goddess and would have us believe is ancient. Graves is probably right: but it is best to approach enchanted ground, as he himself does, doubly armed, with red thread around a rowan twig and a pinch of scepticism. What is ...”

“... is to say, he does not believe that our only authentic knowledge of the true God is that God’s self-revelation, a self-revelation to be received only by faith. But he equally repudiates the natural theology of neo-Thomism and indeed of St Thomas himself: ‘There is ... no two-level reality, consisting of a ...”

“... public inebriation taboo. So it is in recent movies about Hollywood. Larry Levy, an executive in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), tells his rival Griffin Mill that ‘AA meetings are where the best deals are happening.’ The film follows Mill’s wandering but pin-sharp attention as he listens to increasingly bizarre ‘high concept’ story pitches in ...”

“... have told how, even now, survivors of the Far Eastern war have been paying thousands of pounds to self-publishing firms to bring out their fifty-year-old diaries or memoirs. For decades such accounts – some, supposedly, written at the urging of psychiatrists – have been turning up on publishers’ ‘slush piles’; scores more must have been despairingly ...”

“... its own state. Compared to other subordinated nations, Québec already possesses large powers of self-determination, as well as great influence within the Canadian federation. First, it has been conceded by the ROC that if Québec declares unequivocally for independence it will be allowed to leave: no one can conceive of a US-style civil war, and many in the ...”

“... added treasures to the Louvre. The same holds true for some of Manion’s female husbands. Robert Shurtliff, an American soldier in the War of Independence, also known as Deborah Sampson, was celebrated for acting out of the ‘purest patriotism’ and without ‘any selfish motives’. When the British soldier James Gray revealed that he had once been ...”

“... once saw Eric as the ideal baptismal name, to the ultimate dismay of its recipients. Of Eric Gill, Robert Speaight says that being called Eric ‘might not unfairly be described as starting life with a handicap’. The Great War showed what handicapped Erics were made of; in 1918 my cousin Eric, up from Biggin Hill in a two-seater fighter, overhauled ...”

“... she haunts their empty house. The adult Moore says she doesn’t want to excuse her younger self: ‘I was hungry for love. I know that. But so are many sad hungry children and they don’t rummage people’s living quarters and eat their food.’ Her childhood was unhappy, but she suspects that even if it hadn’t been she still would have eaten too ...”

“... thanks to Florence Nightingale – the Napoleonic Wars attract a breezier strain of self-congratulation. An emphasis on jolly seafaring tends to block out carnage, disfigurement and mangled limbs. The deaths of Nelson and Moore are remembered, but as moments of high-minded stoicism hardly stained by the spatter of blood. Uglow’s balanced ...”