“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... the ultimate expression of Popular Front corniness.) Yet however bogus or middlebrow the results may have been, the Popular Front generated a popular culture – which was an alternative to Hollywood’s universalising dream factory. The problem was that this culture had also to be politically reliable. Its dreams were regulated. The New Left which emerged ...”

“... backwardness and isolation. For the present turbo-capitalism cannot long endure either: indeed, it may already be coming to an end. Even in the free-market mecca of Hong Kong the Government is spending its hard-currency reserves to keep up both the Hong Kong dollar and the stock market. The Russians have no such reserves, but they, too, have an already ...”

“... room outclassed that of the company. As somebody sang in Iolanthe, Hearts just as pure and fair May beat in Belgrave Square As in the lowly air Of Seven ...”

“... were back in the house again. The story of my running away to the small town was told, but it may have sounded quite unimportant. Bella stopped going out at night – at least I think she did, for with the return of my parents, I left my room in the basement and moved back upstairs, to rooms where light came in. The next time I went down to the ...”

“... time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour’s time, for it was all a gamble’, their shackles may weaken and fall. The chimpanzees are incomparably more intelligent and responsible than most human beings, merely lack the organs to produce the sounds we have agreed to call language. Tigers wonder, every time they go into their act, why they are so pleased ...”

“... All the necessaries of life are impudently dear. Miners of England and Australia, however poor may be your lot, however dark your present prospects, let no man tempt you to South Africa with tales of the wages that are paid upon the Rand! The wages are high indeed, but the price the workers pay for them is paid in suffering and blood. Van Onselen, being a ...”

“... often sleep on three legs. Jonathan Wordsworth goes on to warn his reader, with a logic that may escape those unfamiliar with recent Romantic criticism, not to ‘overstress the ordinariness of what is happening’. We, like the peasant, would probably see a horse asleep in the moonlight, whereas Wordsworth ‘points out ... something quite different. We ...”

“... into shooting’, makes one very curious as to whether some of the film’s final portentousness may be the responsibility of Wenders rather than Shepard. Like William Carlos Williams, Shepard came and took a hard look at Europe, then turned his back on it. He remains resolutely a Redskin. His achievement has been to avoid the naivety and macho ...”

“... upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives bringing on attacks of déjà vu. Why, then, is Mellow offering this third Fitzgerald biography in five years? His answer: Invented Lives isn’t just another biography. It has a thesis. What thesis? That Scott and Zelda ...”

“... a somewhat limited imagination he drew for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhausting and exasperating this may have been, but it wasn’t, as West concludes, ‘soul-destroying work’. We can set aside the excessive claims West makes for individual pieces, as well as the illfounded suggestion that Orwell was a major innovator in arts broadcasting, anticipating the ...”

“... engineer in Star Trek. From its stilted feel, one often suspects that Hardy’s Queen’s English may have been similarly tin-eared. Thackeray and Surtees are Phillipps’s other favourite sources. But good reporters of their age and class as these writers were, there are caveats to using them as this study sometimes does. Thackeray, more often than not, sets ...”

“... lies grant him temporary satisfactions, but at the cost of a deep loneliness and a fear that he may in fact be an evil, unkind man. The roots of Herbert Badgery’s personality are damaged, and it is this which ultimately limits the scope of Illywhacker. Herbert dominates the book. Even Charles Badgery is really a way of defining Herbert – a necessary ...”

“... between sanity and madness. Naomi’s periodic conviction that she is actually two people may rightly count as mad, but it is only a particularly open acknowledgement, Yehoshua seems to imply, of divisions that are seminal in all of us, and in some of us well-developed. A Late Divorce embodies a remarkable understanding of the reasons why people ...”

“... I would not have believed you.’ Since X. is younger, and stronger, than the chambermaid, one may hope that he, rather than she, represents Poland’s ...”