“... to. ‘I see this as a fairly normal state of mind,’ her note read. Occasionally, the stories may threaten to fall into feminist complaint or cliché, but Munro avoids this by sticking to the personal experience of her rebel female protagonists. Even Flora in ‘Friend of My Youth’, a spinster who represents all that the narrator abhors and has fought ...”

“... was a Jew: his dislike of Berthold Lubetkin, his neighbour in Paris and fellow émigré to London, may have had roots in professional jealousy, but it was intensified by the knowledge that Lubetkin had continually dissembled about his Jewish background, even to his own family. Work began to come in: commissions for schools, offices and housing, as well as the ...”

“... would hardly have recovered from Ralph yet – as I am sure I haven’t.’ ‘We all … hope it may be the last time we will have to send you congratulations on such an occasion,’ Lady Grant wrote back to her daughter with some impatience after James, number 13. Why, given their intelligence and scientific pragmatism, the Stracheys did not control their ...”

“... game a-swearing, or about some act/That has no relish of salvation in’t … that his soul may be as damned and black/As hell, whereto it goes’, he isn’t being the pausing, self-deceiving hero that late 18th-century critics thought he was. Instead, he’s a version of the traditional figure of the devil who carries a sinner off to hell before the ...”

“... of students ‘never attended chapel and went to church only about five times between November and May’. Colleges acted in loco parentis: female students were still required to sign out of their dormitories as recently as the 1960s, noting where and with whom they were going, and to observe curfews. Rules designed to minimise sexual goings-on were in place ...”

“... BC Athenian grave relief doing set into the wall of the tavern? Learned as their research may be, this is off-the-peg, Ikea antiquity, often misleadingly – even uncomprehendingly – applied. One response to such carping is obvious enough. This is cinema, not archaeology. Part of the fun (and the point) of the screen is that it can play fast and ...”

“... I did it, I’d say to myself: “Margaret, you must learn to keep your mouth shut.”’ Robert may be a genius, and is egged on by his admiring parents, but no five-year-old can actually do this kind of thing. And I was never sure that St Aubyn could see how repellent this awful little MacArthur Fellow is. Of course, part of the point is that Robert has ...”

“... complain also, on national grounds, of an unjustifiable want of candour . . . Mr Laplace may walk about and even dance, as much as he pleases, in the flowery regions of algebra, without exciting our smiles.’ Laplace’s cunning analysis of probability allowed reliable calculations to be made about the outcome of games of chance, and was then ...”

“... offered Cannadine carte blanche to examine every scrap of paper in the family archives, there may not have been much material there. Andrew Mellon was reticent in the extreme. He had no way with words, written or spoken, and little intellectual curiosity. Unlike his father, he did not write an autobiography. Assistants produced the books, articles and ...”

“... wild life had been wiped out along with trees. This was the work of the natives but – the reader may wonder – what sort of example had they been set? In King Solomon’s Mines Allan Quatermain’s party shoot half a herd of elephant for sport, tearing out the hearts from two of them for food and leaving the rest. If vultures were absent, mosquitoes and ...”

“... three-mile mountain of buckwheat oats? Figuratively, and psychoanalytically, this porridge-gorger may be said to have eaten or imbibed the world. As Bakhtin observes in his study of Rabelais: ‘The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most … important objects of human thought and ...”

“... revolvers. It’s at least twenty to one that the guy who’s really hired Suggett is Mugabe. They may even hope to trigger a shoot-out with the present team of bodyguards. This is just what Mugabe needs to dramatise his claim that Morgan is trying to kill him. He’ll point to a whole big conspiracy with right-wing South African whites and then he can lock ...”

“... Written in a Country Churchyard is confronted with the speaker’s own epitaph. Gray’s narrator may have ‘gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished), a friend’, but for women poets, that friend and not the solitude of ‘fair Melancholy’ is the necessary precondition of poetic speech. In her compelling claim that the friendship poem – which seems to ...”

“... ceases to be one), there is likewise no fact of the matter about whether a thing is a car; it may be a car according to your story but not according to mine and, in principle, there’s nothing to choose between the stories. So, it’s all or nothing: if there’s no matter of fact at the margins, there’s none in the middle either. I look out of the ...”

“... he asked an old woman why she thought this might be so, she replied: ‘I’m thinking, sir, it may have something to do with the postwar influx of American ...”