“... who finds common ground with the pronouncements of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a ...”

“... meanwhile, pressures were mounting to deal with long-deferred domestic priorities. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton nor Boris Yeltsin could claim the authority in foreign affairs that Reagan and Gorbachev had commanded during the mid-Eighties – or, for that matter, their ability to think ahead, however superficially, about where they would like ...”

“... rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner. Ned did well enough at school to be allowed to study classics, and his classmates became his first real friends. He was attracted to religious ceremony, and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John ...”

“... hatred of orchids and his views on Darwin? Why did he praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and not George Eliot?), that we need to focus more accurately. We get precious little of that kind of definition from Kemp. Instead, we are presented with a tiring stream of second-hand generalisations. One of the consequences of Kemp’s recoil from morbus Ruskinianus ...”

“... in paperback.’ This comment provoked mixed feelings. Still, perhaps there are judges of the Turner Prize who have never heard of – let alone seen a painting by – Ingres.So how did the judges do this year? Well, let us begin by congratulating them: for having chosen a serious book by a serious novelist; for behaving, mostly, with propriety; and for ...”

“... architect’s design of the house shows that Jad Tawil had added the third storey for his brother George in 1947 because George was planning to marry. Aunty Selma lived on the second floor with Jad and his wife Nada and their five boys, including Samir and Fayez. Aunty Esma lived on the ground floor with her husband ...”

“... and a few steps forward would take you into some infinite, radiant void. It’s easy to see why Turner told Ruskin that the skies over Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe. Thanet has two parliamentary constituencies, North Thanet and South Thanet, and a single local council, also called Thanet. Otherwise ‘Thanet’ is a concept linking three seaside ...”

“... and loses a few; the last story finds Bech back where he started. The general narrative is no page-turner, as Bech would say. But the various episodes are, in themselves, very funny. Updike provides a hilariously sour account of the travails of middling, and superlative, American literary success. In his partial eclipse, Bech ‘supported himself by appearing ...”

“... wants, in fact, the kind of pretty, malleable man strong women often want,’ as she observed of George Eliot’s Dorothea in her essay ‘Alison’s Giggle’ (1983). And her lovers would mostly be younger than she was. Pearce was 19 and working as a builder when the 34-year-old Carter asked him over to help with a burst tap. ‘He came in and never ...”

“... appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to ...”

“... posed by Swift’s satire? Are the Houyhnhnms exemplary models of harmonious civility or – as George Orwell thought – robotic proto-fascists? Do the bestial Yahoos embody Swift’s ideas about human depravity, or does he also integrate, in what’s sometimes called the ‘soft’ reading of Gulliver’s Travels, the tools to allow us to escape the ...”

“... the three leading characters, Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner), by means of a pan down from a sign for Clapham Junction station which fits them exactly to a place and time. The play’s loose, episodic structure allows for improvisation. What Loach was to call a ‘go-in-and-grab-it type of filmmaking’ follows the ...”

“... gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the ...”

“... scene after another, exhibiting that scepticism towards conventional representation that Jenny Turner has suggested is a special feature of contemporary West of Scotland writing. The irony is that as Tom’s escapades become progressively entangled, so he falls victim to his own residual belief in plots and schemes. Death and destruction seem to dog his ...”

“... an everywoman, and a frustratingly elusive character to cast. Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Paulette Goddard: all of them were nearly right, yet none quite captured the required quality. Through a mixture of cunning, determination and strategic good luck, Vivien Leigh nabbed the role in a way that might have appealed to Scarlett herself. The ...”