“... comfortably than when forced to ride bicycles or stand on their heads. More ambitious maîtres may decide that Il Barbiere di Siviglia would suddenly become relevant to alienated modern youth if the setting was transposed to a Chinese restaurant in Orpington, but their intentions will be thwarted by the masonic gesticulations of a cast quite unable to ...”

“... were, after the Revolution, the reigning painterly icons of female devotion to the nation. There may even be a paradoxical value in leaving women out of paintings altogether. Géricault, she points out, scarcely painted women at all. In The Raft of the Medusa, he even omitted the real heroine of the ordeal at sea which inspired the work. When he did turn his ...”

“... them by hand, or mail them to interested parties for inspection. James adopted Fletchcrism in May 1904, as he was finishing The Golden Bowl his last major novel. Extolling ‘the divine Fletcher’, and taking an hour over a modest meal, he chewed slowly for almost six years, a period which coincides closely with his rereading and rewriting of his ...”

“... first book, The Early Italian Poets. Restoring Dante Gabriel’s work to its original pre-eminence may prove a difficult task, despite the aid of a biography written without spite or condescension and this good edition of the writings. But is that restoration desirable? Probably not, at least if we want to recover from Rossetti and his work the values he has ...”

“... were recorded in private notebooks, but were never for public recommendation. The Moralists may look like a credo, but it conceals what the author most cared about. Here again we might think of Pope’s Essay on Man: an elegantly achieved justification of enlightened theism that gives no hint of its author’s true devotion. In Pope’s case, of ...”

“... matter of forgery, are what you make them, ‘things are not what they are.’ Of course Sciascia may also be remembering a famous line from Othello, as Borges does in his little parable about Shakespeare, ‘Everything and Nothing’, reminding us that ‘Iago claims with curious words: “I am not what I am.” ’ This is much spookier than his just not ...”

“... need of the women’s colleges for academic respectability. Yet although segregation of the sexes may – in physical education – have been a necessary phase, there is surely much to be said here, as elsewhere, for collaboration as an ultimate objective. In Roberts’s analysis, too, the distinctive situation of women would be clearer if she more frequently ...”

“... a ‘Great Sunday Hunt for Mrs Christie’ was organised. The Evening News advised ‘anyone who may have bloodhounds ... to bring them along’. Men should wear thick boots; women Russian boots and tweed skirts. An aeroplane flew overhead. Meanwhile the Yorkshire Police had come to suspect that a Mrs Theresa Neele, who was staying in a seven-guinea-a-week ...”

“... for a comparison, most of those already offered in the few comments made on MacGill seem inept. He may be a ‘naturalistic’ writer in some respects, but neither Zola nor Gorky are useful exemplars. George Orwell, also cited here and there as a point of reference, is a little closer, since he, too, wrote about the people at the bottom of the heap. But Orwell ...”

“... of Makarios in order to simplify any future arrangements. Papadopoulos told a Turkish newspaper in May 1971 that the two countries ‘should convince our communities’ – in Cyprus – ‘that we are not disposed to spoil the relations between us and quarrel for their sake,’ while in Cyprus the influence of the junta and the presence of a large Greek ...”

“... desire himself, he also takes advantage with hindsight of his own youthful opportunities. It may be true, as he says, that the autobiographic imagination necessarily fills in memory’s gaps, that ‘in writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts’: but frank reference to ‘the lies I’ve made up to get from one poor truth to another’ cannot ...”

“... life: the authors do not explore how far religious organisations’ earlier adoption of youth work may have helped forward the secularising process. One further unfamiliar feature is the adult’s unashamed leadership role within the Brigade. Twentieth-century technological, psychological and educational trends have ensured increasing deference to youth and ...”

“... smoke in jail. Detainees are supposed to get a 30-minute exercise period a day during which they may smoke – if they have cigarettes. But for the first few days of my detention I did not have any exercise period. I was craving a cigarette. The interrogations went on. ‘Look, Mrs Kitson, I can get you out of here in one hour, if you just make a ...”

“... warnings: ‘certainty isn’t easy in a world as big and as strange as this one.’ The world may be large and difficult, but Gray’s treatment of it in this novel is uncharacteristically minute. On his first evening south, Kelvin meets Jill, a vapid bohemian; perhaps he even chooses her for her imagined Nietzschean flavour. Jill introduces the homeless ...”

“... about the next battle, of how they will be better organised, of how tactics can be improved. It may sound like bravado, but you believe them when they say they were prepared to stay out another year. Just as countries at war adapt their economies to special production and consumption needs, Grimethorpe developed a successful strike economy. The black-market ...”