“... book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national director of the YMHA asked that some possibly libellous references be removed from the manuscript; Seidel refused; the prize was revoked, the original ...”

“... of Oedipus and Electra (recall that 16-inch paternal member), the juxtaposition of the attractive young woman leered at by a faceless male multitude, then bisected by one of its number, becomes the causal chain that he needs must loop and yank through narrative after narrative. In his early novels, and in the LA Quartet to which The Black Dahlia ...”

“... but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first. It’s what she does with her freedom that darkens her world. She knows the money is not exactly to blame, but has to believe, once she has married a man who very ...”

“... this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with it – but they ...”

“... jar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels’.) In his role as host and counsellor to the young, Amis comments on his work in progress, like the narrator of London Fields, in interstitial chapters filled with writing advice and ‘what Gore Vidal used to call “book chat”’. The advice is enjoyably pontifical about such matters as the ‘sonic ...”

“... concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who want to have sex with children’) are all described by Dr Li as merely ‘ambivalent’ in ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... the opposite: it would have been improved by more extravagant invention. The stories of a group of young men who find themselves supervising the transfer of British power in an imaginary West African colony (‘Balunda’) in the Sixties are picked up in the Eighties. They have become recognisable types, but are not distinct or amusing or even grotesque enough ...”

“... of a more rhapsodical and isolated kind. Thomas felt lucky to get a smell of printer’s ink so young, but his success proved to be a mixed blessing. It instantly typecast him as ‘a country writer’, and discouraged attempts he might otherwise have made to conform more closely to his father’s model. When he went from St Paul’s to Oxford in 1897 ...”

“... outside ourselves of all that is bad in the world and in us. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil called this process the making of ‘displeasure-images’, and identified it as ‘part of the oldest psychotechnical apparatus mankind possesses’. Together with our tendency to take things figuratively, this is the mechanism which complies with ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”

“... as the ‘human sciences’, which, simply on the lexical plane, establishes a bridge between the young sociology (for example) and the old, but still valid, Humanities of our grandparents. On the whole, Hexter’s positive assessment of this French superiority (for once!) seems to me pertinent, though pleasantly flattering too to my tricoloured ...”

“... In the meantime, however, the United Irishmen were pushed back into self-reliance, manifested in Robert Emmet’s attempted insurrection of 1803. Elliott gives this as much space as Hoche’s expedition, though it had no concrete connection with France. Like the rest of her book, apart from broad-ranging introductory and concluding chapters, this account is ...”

“... with ease – a quality he admired in Romilly? Or was it his fear of death, so intense when he was young and conquered only when he came to die? Or was it some extension of his ego? All novelists are egoists who spin their characters from observing themselves as much as other people and choose subject-matter from their experience. But Philip Toynbee’s ego ...”

“... III, yet he positioned himself as the voice of science and reason, above the quotidian fray.As a young man, caught up in the turmoil of 1848, Renan wrote a manifesto, ‘The Future of Science’, which gave confident expression to his hopes that disinterested inquiry would increasingly dispel superstition and confusion. But, perhaps for reasons of ...”