“... In other words, they are lumpers rather than splitters; the risk, as Parry sees it, is that they may be offering only stereotypes of stereotypes. On the other hand, he shows us plenty of cases where the reality was even worse than the stereotype. The swank and swagger began with Sidney Smith, who seems to have been the first British officer to grasp that ...”

“... and Sean Connery paired up with Bernard Bresslaw for a Eugene O’Neill two-hander. The programme may have leaned more towards the arts than the sciences, but the recitals, screenings and read-throughs were interspersed with talks on cybernetics, law reform and planar geometry. Advising one of his scientists on how to speak to a room full of artists, Stefan ...”

“... against Russia, quickly pivoted to the cost of living as the major issue of her campaign.This may set a precedent for the way the war in Ukraine translates into domestic politics in Europe. Even if parties are united in their condemnation of the invasion, this does not – and should not – end challenges to government policies by opposition parties. The ...”

“... to England by a Captain Daws, ‘his first Master’, and there ‘presented’ to Mrs Turner. He may have already been captive for more than a decade, trapped inside her house in the village of Sudbury. He never learned to speak English. Like a pet animal, he was kept to amuse his jailors, ‘being frequently call’d in to Dance about, and to Sing after his ...”

“... the wine?’Molly said with authority, ‘You’ll want white for your soup. White burgundy.’‘May I suggest the Montrachet?’ The waiter tapped a numbered item on the wine list.‘Super,’ Molly said. ‘And I think a Bordeaux with my pheasant. This Margaux’ – she pointed. ‘We can share. Though you might want a Côtes du Rhône with your main ...”

“... labour which produced them than in the desire they arouse. In ‘The Prussian Officer’ (written May-June 1913), the scar on a young orderly’s thumb drives his superior to distraction. ‘And the next day he had to use all his will-power to avoid seeing the scarred thumb. He wanted to get hold of it and – a hot flame ran in his blood.’ The scar is the ...”

“... will be worth attending to this tale: the authorial voice is steady and confident. English fiction may be largely at the mercy of moonlighting journalists (auditioning for more copy in the Sundays), but the American Novel, line-edited until it shines, is safely in the hands of the Literature Professors, who are happy to remain on tenure while their raids carry ...”

“... the use of getting involved in a bloody saga if you won’t tell a poet about it?’ Berton may not be a poet, but he is a fluent writer of narrative prose, and The Arctic Grail is the best survey of 19th-century Arctic exploration yet written. William Barr has translated and edited Heinrich Klutschak’s Als Eskimo unter den Eskimos as Overland to ...”

“... and ossified organisations as the Communist Youth League, the trade unions and the Party apparatus may be long overdue. Nevertheless, something is disintegrating and nothing has yet taken its ...”

“... are natural bedfellows. Mormons – like Muslims – would have died for their prophet: it may have been in recognition of this that Joseph Smith, a more far-sighted, humane and intelligent man than Koresh, surrendered to the authorities at Carthage, Illinois in 1844, in circumstances very similar to those preceding the tragic events at Waco. Faced ...”

“... in a strip cartoon? Why, in short, doesn’t Rosenthal stop and think? A failure to stop and think may be one explanation, however partial, of a staggering statement made by Rosenthal in the course of a recent catalogue essay for an exhibition of Gilbert and George in Peking and Shanghai. It is a passage which could have been treated as the expression of a ...”

“... the ages have puffed up their little initiatives (what does Paragraph 59 mean, other than ‘we may be a bit more flexible about who we take, but don’t bet on it’?). Elsewhere, the language has a more sinister tinge. In the ‘Statement of Purpose’ it is declared that ‘our function is to serve scholarship, research and enterprise.’ What would ...”

“... with the more excruciating purities of the profession, is quite explicit that ‘psychoanalysis may be defined as a moral activity.’ She believes, despite what she calls ‘the sacred rules of psychoanalysis’, that analysts have got a lot to learn from novelists, that they are ‘all novelists manqués’; and that though psychoanalysis is not a ...”

“... constipated in the way the junky intestine usually is, to loosen off and start to move. You may imagine what happens next. This episode is very funny in its grossness, a sort of realist version of William Burroughs’s talking arsehole routine. But it is also, like the talking arsehole routine, much more than merely funny. As I have said already, one of ...”

“... he opposes; either he allows it to refute itself, by depicting the terrible human consequences it may entail, or he poses an alternative image exemplifying another moral attitude (just as he counterposes Ivan Karamazov’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor to the account of Father Zosima’s life). In the Diary he closes with an image of himself as a ...”