“... mere neighbourliness but is still less ardent than blood brotherhood, however deep the respect may run. Blake says, ‘Opposition is true friendship,’ and though that sounds very bracing, particularly to the argumentative, and subscribing to its wisdom probably works out well for everyone in the best of all possible worlds, among the writers in this ...”

“... with its consequence, ‘the appalling popularity of music’, are critical gestures which may well endear him to us today. Motion is reliable in his distribution of emphasis over the small corpus of Lambert’s compositions, even if short on original insights. One of his apparently striking illuminations – Constant’s ‘habit of writing in a way ...”

“... was fingering them, so I got the impression that he wished me to look at them. At last I said: ‘May I look at those?’ ‘I want you to,’ he answered. ‘I should be greatly obliged if you would run a pencil over them and improve their diction and rhythm.’ I demurred, but he meant what he said. The first ones I read seemed to me of exceeding beauty. I ...”

“... the Whitlam doctrine that the interests of reformers and conservatives are irreconcilable. Hawke may be wrong and Whitlam right; but what is certain is that Hawke regards the memory of the Whitlam years as an electoral liability for Labor. Whitlam does not discuss the part played by himself in his own downfall. He admits his relative indifference to economic ...”

“... affair with death, a fetishist: distilled from their embodiments as stories, Tournier’s subjects may appear outlandish and bizarre. The fact that in their worked-out form the stories have the credibility of things discovered and merely mediated is partly due to the way Tournier incorporates into them experiences familiar to us all, experiences we recognise ...”

“... has carried across from the 18th century, and is conducive to the lethal truth. ‘King George may be said to have helped by maintaining a level of unpopularity conducive to uprisings.’ ‘His peculiar talent was simply to voice unchanging principles, a sort of indolence which often passes for integrity.’ Such sentences execute Swift’s own principles ...”

“... against classical political economy. Jevons conceded in the 1870s that historical investigation ‘may very properly do for political economy what Sir Henry Maine has done for jurisprudence’. Alfred Marshall, always sensitive to a shift in the wind, was not slow to distance himself, and the academic discipline which he kept under his wing, from the alien ...”

“... to advantage’ in The Belle’s Stratagem, it seems that her acting and way with the words may have been less pleasing. There were some who attributed her subsequent lack of advancement in London to her Irish brogue. ‘Miss Smithson improves nightly,’ patronised Bell’s Weekly Messenger, ‘and is rapidly losing that drawl, which we presume she ...”

“... fact that J.I.M. Stewart is also the detective writer Michael Innes leads me to think that a clue may be lurking around these uncompromising demises. An innocent question is asked at the mid-way stage of the novel: ‘Who wrote a novel called The Amazing Marriage?’ Penelope Rich, the heroine, knows her Meredith, and can reply to the question, which has very ...”

“... and grand denunciations of human villainy; they are notable social documents; and whatever we may think of the biographical fallacy, their connection with the mystery of Traven will give them a lasting place in literary history. But are they the work of a major writer? I think not. Traven’s place is probably that which Somerset Maugham assigned to ...”

“... is also impressed by multiples, and with the (unsubstantiated) evidence that there may be neurological correlates of the condition. Like many other people today, she wants to emphasise variety as opposed to the old shibboleth of unity – and that goes for the unity of the self, too, Braude takes her to put multiples at the end of a range of ...”

“... breasts) and feature cartoons of naked women on top of one another. He also claims that Barnes may have been raped by her father, but more likely by a friend of her father’s, with his knowledge. Barnes’s mother, an Englishwoman who had been ‘adopted’ by Zadel, gave her inheritance to her new husband, only to see it shared with other women, and to ...”

“... European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course is the subject’s greatest challenge. Few if any of us possess the necessary breadth of knowledge and skills which such a wide-angled view of the ...”

“... Is it surprising that the poems should be so strong and straight when the poet was so devious? It may be that the second condition causes the first. Rilke doesn’t have too much in common with Brecht, but both of them probably knew so much about grace and courage because they had an intimate and harrowing experience of what it meant to lack them. There is a ...”

“... light’ also blocks out one’s proper empathy with, and understanding of, the poor. While it may be true that the poor are people like you and me because we were all created by God, it is only through an understanding of a country’s history, and the history of the poor, that we can begin to appreciate that, indeed, the poor were people like you and me ...”