“... But division is well recorded in Scots from the early 15th century on. It is possible that Lorimer may have thought of his translation as a step towards establishing what linguists call a grapholect, a national written language which is used, as English is, by speakers of a number of different dialects, though no one speaker will draw on all of its lexical ...”

“... experience is conveyed with hallucinatory conviction. To compare Ivy Litvinov with Colette may seem absurd: but although one of them purrs and the other growls, they speak the same language of female awareness. Perhaps Ivy would have come out better if a woman had written her biography: but at least this one stimulates a wish to see her work published ...”

“... if you spend too much time ploughing through such leaden and unrelievedly earnest material you may seriously damage your brain. One has to pick up the Critchley volume to remind oneself that politics is often funny. Critchley bids an appalled farewell to his colleagues, ‘Mother’ Teresa Gorman, ‘Little Norm’ Lamont, ‘Big Norm’ Tebbit and all the ...”

“... fishermen. All relationships, in Somali, are defined in terms of cognates, to the extent that we may address a total stranger as ‘cousin’, and those whom we know as ‘brother/sister’, to connote closeness. There are two broad categories into which one’s fellow Somalis fall: reer magaal and reer baadiye, the prefix reer indicating sibling status ...”

“... were now no obstacle to the laity, and claiming that use would remove any difficulty. He may have been overoptimistic – though no one who has heard a child reel off ‘diplodocus’ and ‘pterodactyl’ will be too certain – but at least here he gets a rare opportunity to meet his commentator’s tendentious reformulations head-on. Generally he ...”

“... altered and deepened. I myself have never found him a particularly attractive figure, though this may be a function of my gender. Contrary to what is often supposed, Boswell was never very interested in, as distinct from obsessed with, women. His journals and letters rarely recorded female conversations for their own sake. With the exception of Belle de ...”

“... off each other more harmoniously; but they are still very visible, a sort of signature, and it may be worth trying to say what they are. Garrulousness first of all. Rushdie’s narrators not only talk a lot, they are their talk. They are not so much characters as voices – sometimes they are unconvincing as characters – and the less they understand ...”

“... recording of the fabric of daily life, they resemble Pilgrimage, in which, as the novelist May Sinclair noted approvingly, ‘nothing happens.’ Richardson was the third of four daughters of a man who sold the family grocery business in order to live as a ‘gentleman’. But the privileges she enjoyed – summer holidays by the sea, a good education ...”

“... the perverse relationship between violence and luxury in a sequence of analogues, though behind it may lurk a more old-fashioned poem of sexual disgust. Rolls-Royces idle, ‘their seats upholstered with the hides of stillborn calves’; there’s a ‘jigger of blood on your swish organza’; even a tagged cactus causes ‘ecstasy’ by reminding ‘you’ of ...”

“... neophytes seeking transformation. Olgivanna kept Wright on a short leash even when sexual fantasy may be assumed to have taken the place of sexual activity.’ Taliesin, even now, preserves not just the archive and the place but also the festivals of the Fellowship. This preserved presence apart, what was Wright’s legacy? The split-level ranch house, Gill ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anything but anonymous son. Then, having reduced her to a nonentity, he declares that, whatever he may have achieved in the world, compared with his mother he is ‘nothing’. Some ‘nothing’ is all one can say: there are moments when Le Premier homme seems disturbingly extreme in its mother-cult. There are pleasures in Jacques’s boyhood, but they are ...”

“... observations. In other words, the disorienting physical and social environment of eastern Montana may be exactly as he reports it, just as the mouth of the Mississippi really is (or was) a torrent of mud and uprooted trees, and the Atlantic voyage against the prevailing winds in a mid-19th-century steamer much less comfortable than sailing home with the wind ...”

“... it detracted not at all from his enjoyment of women. Brivati thinks that he and Dora Gaitskell may have had an arrangement which allowed for his probably quite numerous affairs, particularly his long relationship with Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann – certainly the Gaitskells often dined with one or both Flemings, making one wonder quite what the mutual ...”

“... believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may be safely said that the curious and unique development of the art of pastel that this obstacle compelled him to evolve would not have come into being but for his affliction. A large scale became a necessity. For the shiny medium of oil paint was substituted ...”