“... print. Dover Books brought out a paperback edition of Lady Audley’s Secret in 1974, and in 1987 David Skilton edited it for the Oxford World’s Classics. In the interim, as Lyn Pykett’s excellent introduction to a new Oxford edition explains, both Braddon and sensation fiction in general experienced a revival as a result of the rise of feminist criticism ...”

“... might no longer want to be where he thought he was going. I don’t know whether Carruth regards David Lynch as an influence, but Lynch’s name kept coming into my mind as I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do ...”

“... he arrived in Paris in 1785, Boilly specialised in cabinet paintings for private collectors. Two Young Women Kissing (c.1790), on display at the National Gallery’s small exhibition of his paintings (until 19 May), was previously catalogued as The Friends and Two Sisters, kidding absolutely nobody. These early works, heavy in innuendo and set in fashionable ...”

“... of reach for those who need it most urgently, but cannot pay for a lawyer. He and his successors (David Gauke is the fourth justice secretary in three years) failed to resist the cuts that by 2020 will have reduced the Ministry of Justice’s budget by 40 per cent in a decade, and have already caused it to lose many of its senior and most competent civil ...”

“... a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality’. In his book A Way of Life (1984), he writes of wanting, ‘in a modest way, to use the ...”

“... rights and wrongs, do’s and don’t’s. It is characteristic that Greene should commission a young and comparatively untried man as his biographer and give him so much help and freedom. In so doing, he has served himself and the reader well. Here is the sympathetic, but not uncritical wherewithal to form a fair impression of an important and deeply ...”

“... might help prop him up in his doddering years.‘Philip had searched diligently for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I ...”

“... a very difficult because compacted poem, evidently arose from a terrible accident to a young man. And an extraordinary poem, ‘Wanting to live in Harlem’, from Final Solutions, makes irrefutable connections between a boy growing up in St Louis, dreams of a fair black woman, two boys in Harlem, and an account – taken from the Cambridge Ancient ...”

“... toward its present form. McDowell is a Senior Fellow of Trinity and a well-known historian. David Webb is a Fellow Emeritus of the College and Honorary Professor of Systematic Botany. ‘Virtue and religion’ meant, of course, Anglicanism. The Fellows of Trinity were required to take an oath and, in most cases, to take Anglican orders. Undergraduates ...”

“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a long trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, a woman turns up on the last page, out of the blue, and says: ‘The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time ...”

“... a poor husband for an immensely attractive and highly intelligent girl, who was anyway still too young to marry. He was reserved, dull and apparently interested only in dogs – when she fainted at a ball during their engagement, he showed no concern, carrying on talking to his friends – though he did have an illegitimate daughter before he ...”

“... point, Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he ...”

“... would die of throat cancer. He also claimed the Liberal Government had killed King Edward VII. David Gilmour, who does the best he can to defend Kipling against his detractors, insists that some of this was not intended ‘personally’, but it is hard to see how that could be. In fact Kipling comes over as a deeply unsympathetic character in this superb ...”

“... as linguistic. These multiple associations are all incisively reconstructed and investigated in David Fishman’s The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. This is a brief but compact book, divided into two parts that concentrate on two roughly contiguous historical periods: tsarist Russia from the end of the 19th century to 1914, and Poland between the wars. It ...”

“... still had to argue endlessly with customs officials and ended up paying much of the time. The young Swiss physician Thomas Platter had better luck at the end of the 16th century. His passport issued in Geneva was accepted on the Rhone boat from Lyon, but passengers without papers simply bribed the boatmen and on they went. To enter Catholic Spain, Platter ...”