“... its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel. It is the 1920s. Timothy Harcombe, the narrator, works with his father Clement, a faith-healer, at the Chemical Theatre in the City Road in London; his mother Cecilia died in giving him birth. Each ...”

“... the law of causality unites all the parts into a whole. This characteristically Japanese principle may seem more incidental, associational and irrational than its Western counterpart, so it is not surprising that Westerners often complain of meandering formlessness in Japanese novels, music, dance and theatre: but the Japanese in return find the implacable ...”

“... of military and medical incompetence hovers over the story of the fatal wound at Zutphen. And it may also be doubted whether the chivalric behaviour hymned by Sidney’s biographers was appropriate to the conditions of guerrilla warfare. Greville commends Sidney less for what he did, which in politics was so little, than for what he was. But what was ...”

“... traders and saying, “Buy it, I don’t care what the price is, buy it,”’ one attendee told Robert Bryce. As New York closes, the announcement comes. Enron, which began by owning pipelines carrying natural gas, is going to organise the trading of ‘bandwidth’ (capacity) in pipelines that carry information, the fibre-optic cables of the Internet. At ...”

“... must also come to terms with him as a political thinker. His critique of corporate capitalism may not be theoretically sophisticated, but it is coherent and powerful – and very American. Indeed, his provincial Americanism may be both a strength and a weakness: he has never been able to bring foreign policy into ...”

“... at once over and underperform to an extent that other commodities do not. For Ngai, the gimmick may take the shape of an idea, technique or thing-like device, but is best understood as a performance: it is ‘both a wonder and a trick’, she argues, in a formulation which launches the book’s series of case studies. These are performances that elicit ...”

“... set adrift from the respectability of marriage and driven to fight her battles in public. Besant may well have felt attracted to Bradlaugh and Stead, but what she most needed from men was companionship in the pursuit of moral ideals. Certainly, her life had a richly quirky and wilful side. But was it any more quirky than those of her male contemporaries ...”

“... which ‘lent themselves to presentation in apocalyptic terms’. Disenchantment may be part of this story; but it does not provide a sociologically satisfying explanation. It places too much emphasis on the intellectual minority who articulate the new religiosity without explaining why they have become so influential. Martin Riesebrodt opts ...”

“... comparison with Beckett would be neither irrelevant nor absurd. The French novelist and playwright Robert Pinget was put forward in the 1960s as an exponent of the ‘nouveau roman’. But his affiliation with Beckett was always stronger than the temporary association with Robbe-Grillet’s travelling circus, and Beckett paid him the compliment of making an ...”

“... unconcerned about his lack of heirs. While he was devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to ...”

“... spell in a Chilean prison to take up a one-sided relationship with a former friend living in Rome. Robert, in the story of the same name, is ‘a black American of indeterminate age with a rather grand manner’ who carries his paintings (and his desperate idealism) around with him in a black tin trunk. We catch our last sight of Pat as he stumbles pointlessly ...”

“... escapes through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic ...”

“... the wind-farm gold-rush. Of course there are animals and birds, which look wild and free, but you may be sure they’ve been counted, ringed maybe, even radio-tagged, and all for good scientific reasons. And if we do find a Wild Place, we can prance about there knowing that no bears or wolves will appear over the bluff, because we disposed of the top ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones left him in a ‘condition of constant and dangerous and most painfull sickness’. Later he would recall that not a single moment of his youth had been without pain. Yet when the diary begins, he’s exultant. The ...”