“... to redress the balance of the surface world of Restoration France, the surface world not as it may actually have been but the shrunken, partial and too lenient view he supposed his contemporaries to take of it. Where their view was accepting for being incomplete, his would be damning for being total. Thanks to his imaginary staircase into the lower ...”

“... and interesting people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by ...”

“... of each enterprise with which he was associated; but he rarely fulfilled the promise. One may be censorious and argue that his career testifies to the vanity of political ambition, but this is a bank manager’s view, and something must be said on the other side. Chamberlain put on a great show which, wherever he took it, made a very large number of ...”

“... flat and left a neat docket of pawn tickets on the mantelpiece. Readers of Blessings in Disguise may sometimes feel that the book is Hamlet without the Prince, but the publishers are at pains to point out that this is not ‘the exercise in egomania purveyed by so many actors and actresses’. It is on the whole a fascinating account of some of Guinness’s ...”

“... place-names, stories, flora and fauna. Mr Campbell keeps carefully to his sources, though he may take them too seriously. It is engaging that he believes a mid-17th-century chief of Clanranald could and would himself write a long letter to the Pope in Latin. His weakness is a failure of historical detachment: the grievances about the pressure of ...”

“... Mr Brittan was suddenly saved by a generous withdrawal from Sir Raymond, who accepted that there may have been a ‘misunderstanding’. No sooner was Mr Brittan out of that, however, than he was entangled once again. The Prime Minister told the House on 14 January that she had set up an inquiry into the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter about ...”

“... 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 go back to my room. ‘What a bastard I am,’ I keep whispering, ‘what a bastard I am.’ He may have been a bastard, but he could write. And, what’s more, he was correct in his assessment of his editor’s prose style. There might have been some point to all this if focusing on ‘Didi’s’ many delinquencies had resulted in a better book. But ...”

“... every citizen was a precious national asset. The same was true of Britain during the Great War, as may be discovered from Jay Winter’s superb scholarly analysis. The subject-matter is more specialised than his title suggests. This is a socio-economic historian’s investigation of the impact of war on population trends and civilian health, with an ...”

“... writer’s cool obsession with death, and his evident conviction that in articulo mortis there may be that moment of supreme clarity which the novelist spends his creative life hunting. Time and again, Fuentes’s novel alludes to ‘the man hanged from Owl Creek Bridge, who at the instant of his death could see the veining of each leaf; more: the very ...”

“... points all the time. In matters of the NUJ and the Gas Board Levin’s rhetorical posturing may have some result. In matters of global conflict it can have no result at all, apart from the negative one of further distorting the truth. Levin sees great issues in the form of psychodrama. There are heroes and villains, with nobody in between. For all his ...”

“... the question I posed at the outset – the connection between Enlightenment and Revolution – it may well be because it was, all along, the wrong question to put. If, instead of characterising the Revolution as the harbinger of the New Era, one sees it as a convulsion of nostalgic desperation, and its protagonists, not as men with their gaze directed at a ...”

“... it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint and it may have a certain macabre appeal.’ Orwell was writing a tract, Priestley and Bainbridge are writing travel books. They are outraged by poverty, distressed by shabbiness and boredom, and appreciative of tolerance, variety and eccentricity. What they saw made ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... translating the 46th Psalm, Shakespeare was copying Paley’s papers. Burgess and his reviewers may resent their conscription into the anti-Stratford camp, but the company is distinguished there. Hawthorne, after all, supported the speculations of Delia Bacon; and Freud underlined his significance as a literary critic by arguing that Shakespeare’s plays ...”