“... literary opinions are just as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the ...”

“... living room. ‘I’m biting the baby,’ he said. ‘D’ you want to?’ The baby was lying on a white towelling nappy and Moggie was bent over her, biting her arms and then her legs and then the cheeks of her face. He said he did it all the time and that the baby liked it. He said it was like tickling. I didn’t want to do it but said I’d stay and ...”

“... Books’, ‘Stories 1900-1939’ and so on – splendidly produced, with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and giving a good indication of what’s been available at various moments during this interesting period. We have only to glance at the catalogue to see how the Edwardian idea of manliness was purveyed for adolescent boys (‘A Lad of ...”

“... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...”

“... whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of Shakespeare (and then of Landor). For these are not the very words ...”

“... del Oro, featuring a photograph of a buxom, dark-eyed equestrienne wearing ostrich feathers, white tights and a fetching pout. Rosita was the artist’s lover when he was a 15-year-old student in Barcelona. She has previously been described as a prostitute rather than a circus star. With the poster, Richardson illustrates a page from a sketchbook of the ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... backsides: The military bullocks loomed at us from the windows of the bus. They looked like huge white one-eyed sea monsters in a tank. The nasty ink black eyes of the anuses stared at us. They were very malevolent and they seemed to be surrounded by murky perimeters that varied in their shades of darkness. Place beside this an episode from The Witches of ...”

“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...”

“... One without looks in tonight   Through the curtain-chink From the sheet of glistening white; One without looks in tonight   As we sit and think   By the fender-brink. We do not discern those eyes   Watching in the snow; Lit by lamps of rosy dyes We do not discern those eyes   Wondering, aglow,   Fourfooted, tiptoe. Hardy’s poem is ...”

“... was so excessive that it failed to take on. It urged Australians to cut all their ties with the white man’s culture and to develop a new art and literature based on that of the aborigines, the folk who had lived longest in contact with the soil. Despite its muddled thinking and its impossible demands on artists, it was a healthy reaction against overseas ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... The blue line can bluff.‘What [was] hee in his Mothers Womb,’ the 17th-century physician William Harvey wondered: ‘whether three bubbles? Or some rude and indigested lump?’ We have better answers to Harvey’s question now, but many others remain unanswered. Fertility doctors can sort and tidy sperm, for example – selecting for well-shaped ...”

“... was drawn in the Sixties into political action, and had joined the 1971 demonstrations outside the White House protesting the bombing of North Vietnam. When Salter asked Clampitt if she had ever wanted children, she replied: ‘Oh no, when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima I knew that this wasn’t a world I wanted to bring children ...”