“... Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel). There is panegyric: on Cromwell (Heroic Stanzas), on Charles II (Astraea Redux, To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the ...”

“... Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, the grandson of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. The main story starts with the birth of Caroline in 1723 and ends with the death of Sarah in 1826. About these four sisters and every single thing connected with them, one comes to feel, Aristocrats is ...”

“... late 1950s to the famous torture trial of 1967. These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The ...”

“... conventional realist narrative. The stream of consciousness novel has difficulty registering the passage of time (the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse is an exception) and, without chapter or headings, Self sometimes has to drop some pretty heavy hints to tell the reader she has entered a different period. In 1971 Busner thinks about ...”

“... the 1970s. Another of his tenants was Thomas Pynchon, who wrote some of Gravity’s Rainbow at 161 Charles Lane in the West Village. Their association was complicated by Pynchon’s fear of Harrison’s feral cat Martha, who stalked his rooms and disrupted his concentration with her demonic stare. Harrison and Tom had lunch every Tuesday with Donald ...”

“... pages). It is hard to know why anyone should wish to support, or illuminate, an argument with this passage from Marshall McLuhan; ‘As the 19th century heated up the mechanical and dissociative procedures of technical fragmentation, the entire attention of men turned to the associative and the corporate.’ St George has much to say about the Victorian ...”

“... be produced by other hands, with her collaboration and under her direction. Despite a considerable passage of time, Layman notes bleakly, this work has not materialised; nor do the reminiscences in An Unfinished Woman and the other memoirs form an acceptable substitute in (so to speak) Layman’s terms: he refers to those various portraits of Hammett as ...”

“... Roy Shaw will not have expected an easy passage as Secretary-General of the Arts Council, but the weather worsened steadily during his tenure, and the discomfort exceeded all rational apprehensions. His book explains why this was so.* The directorate of the Council exists primarily to make judgments of value; it is required, having taken the best advice available, to decide which enterprises deserve public support, and to what extent ...”

“... Failing to induce his girl to provide it, he finds a more eager partner in a fellow officer called Charles Manning. The encounter is graphically described. Here, as in all her work, Barker insists that the intellectual and moral issues which she writes about are inescapably grounded in the life of the body – ‘because this mass of nerve and blood and muscle ...”

“... a History of the Crusades (1820), one of the earliest studies devoted specifically to the topic, Charles Mills deplored the medieval fanaticism and popery. In The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty of Egypt (1896), William Muir, while suggesting that the Crusades had a positive role in rousing Europe from the slumber of the Dark Ages, went on to denounce them: The ...”

“... achievement at best a minor or compromised one. It seems that the idea for this book came from a passage in George Steiner’s study of language and translation, After Babel – itself an intellectual adventure in the grand old conquistadorial manner. Steiner deplored the fact that, whereas a good many literary creators have left documentation, in the form ...”

“... hair and fishes a drowned child from a creek. In This Other Eden, Harding’s latest novel, a long passage recalls how two men felled a pine tree, sawed it up, split it into planks, dragged it through a forest and built a house from it – an achievement now under threat since the house, like everything else on Apple Island, is about to be destroyed.Unlike ...”

“... the arrival of the bacon and eggs, incontestably inferior to those of his own country.There is no passage like that in the first twenty Maigrets. But there was no softening of Simenon’s worldview. Indeed, that sense of increased psychic space, and the accommodation of some quirkiness in the plot set-ups, can make the psychological asperity even ...”

“... sympathy, but then it was no bad thing to have a marriage to Bluebeard annulled. We strike a good passage once Henry has turned into ‘the English Nero’. One unlooked-for side-effect of Henry’s policy of killing off the great and nobly born all round him was the catastrophic dwindling of the ranks of the Knights of the Garter. It was really very ...”

“... better history would have been if some revolutionary or ‘radical’ event had been avoided (if Charles I had won the Civil War; if the English had won the war against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War) or, less often, how much worse history would have been if it had taken a more ...”