“... Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get ...”

“... So far, I may have given more expression of preference than solid argument. I need now to list the main details throughout the book which prepare the reader for Stephen to accept the Bloom Offer. There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer ...”

“... his eight-year-old daughter. His first wife, assuming he had one and she was the same sort of age, may now be a millionaire, she may own a chain of shops or be a top civil servant or the wife of a duke: but her womb, according to Greer, will be the size of an almond and one thing she won’t have is an eight-year-old ...”

“... of the Ribbentrop-Molotov hyphen, while it is true that men like Mikhail Suslov and Mao Tse-tung may have gone to their graves thinking of the Leninist state as history exemplified, it is not believable that Edvard Gierek or Milos Jakes or any of the other ‘Vodka-Cola’ general secretaries (Erich Honecker partially exempted) thought anything of the ...”

“... and joking about Nietzsche. Since the Zeitgeist business is so vigorous just now many may find Selbourne’s title and prophetic posture quite appealing. But I suspect even those with pronounced apocalyptic tastes will be liable to exhaustion en route to his particular revelation. There are no oases. Over 376 pages, every glimmer of emergent hope ...”

“... 18th century, can only be got at through the antechamber of his altogether individual style. You may love it, you may hate it, but you cannot overlook it. Reading Rawson, you’re forever being reminded of who it is you’re reading. What can be discovered, then, from the examples thus far? First, he delights in the ...”

“... for starting the fighting. Different rules regulate the resort to armed force. The sceptic may question whether these rules are of any practical significance. In fact, they derive from a moral recognition that war might legitimate some killings but not necessarily every killing. Even in war, it is possible to avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering. In ...”

“... There is no doubt that language offers irresistible ground on which class and generational battle may be waged in tones of measured common sense tuned to the innocently offended ear-drum. Of Professor Brian Cox much was hoped. His Black Paper past promised drills and canons, rote and rigour. The report’s chapter on literature teaching is dull: but the ...”

“... why no Kipling? The ‘authorities’ support one another, often repetitiously (thus one account may reappear in slightly different versions). Nothing objectionable in that: we’re not looking for ‘scientific’ evidence, although Williams uses it, along with evidence of other kinds. The two parts are as intimately complementary as verse and gloss in The ...”

“... is what you really meant; and penalise and punish the author accordingly. But elsewhere the censor may not bother to strip away the conventions; he may not even recognise that they exist. Art for art’s sake will mean nothing to him. The Satanic Verses may be a great work of art, the ...”

“... the country’ – that’s to say, with two fictionalisations, at quite different levels, of what may or may not have happened. Her enquiry was eventually modified to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by ...”

“... Reagan’s impenetrable fatuousness – the question that precipitated Morris’s block. It may answer the question: how do I spin my non-findings into a big book that will prevent me from having to give back my three million dollar advance to Random House? It may also answer the question: how do I vent my festering ...”

“... of deft twists, however, the novel broaches this conflict only to deconstruct it. Helen and Hugh may buy their wine at a posh south Dublin supermarket, but Hugh speaks Irish to the children and Helen is sullenly nostalgic for her rural Wexford home. Ironically, it is her thoroughly modern mother, a computer specialist who favours avant-garde living ...”

“... while accepting its possible solipsistic and error-laden basis. For those accidents, that energy, may well issue from a personality that can’t be taken on trust. Indeed, as we shall see, Hill says as much: although ‘one’ would make the claim for a poet’s helplessness before language, something prohibits the claim from sticking, since that would ...”

“... are to be obtained. There you are sitting in France, and you suddenly feel that something strange may be about to happen, that there might be texts written half-way between France and Britain – all the more so as the British are one degree of consciousness ahead of the French. France’s own isolation and lack of curiosity are themselves notorious, and ...”