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“... in 1938: however, the British Library strangely did not acquire a copy (nothing fishy here, I hope?). Coal-holes, obscurity: I can’t seem to find much clue to his psyche here, beyond a familiarity with the shadows. Let us forget crime, then. It remains true that no one has been quite straight with us, neither Pennington, nor his old and his new ...”

“... hospice can relieve pain and bring both the dying and the survivors to terms with death; and of Christopher Leach’s book, to come to terms with it himself. Both fathers are professional writers, both in agony turn to their pens. We readers can see that both books are what Colin Murray Parkes in Bereavement calls ‘grief-work’, a part of the way in ...”

“... to problems of figure and ground: how to combine the domestic scale with the broad view. Even Christopher Burns’s The Flint Bed, which looks to be going to find its subject in English provincial life, expands (via a plot tied to a photograph from 1975 of desperate refugees fighting to get onto a helicopter lifting off from the American Embassy in ...”

“... Christopher Andersen’s book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise ...”

“... pseudonym, which is where people get nervous. The worry – or, it seems, in some quarters, the hope – is that Ferrante is a front for a shadowy collective, a husband-and-wife team or, worse, a balding bloke whose guerrilla strike against identity-political orthodoxies got awe-inspiringly out of hand. Whoever’s pulling her strings scatters teasing ...”

“... character-shaping misadventures (the declared aim of the earlier instalments), James expresses a hope ‘that young people contemplating a career in the arts and the media might find guidance here, and those less young people who have run into difficulties might find consolation’. Boisterous tales of his sexual follies dry up, though he plainly kept an ...”

“... was going,’ she assures us. ‘But I do believe this much: sooner or later, and in my case I hope later, you’ll have to look at exactly who you were and everything you did, and it’s going to be a shitshow.’ There are signs, here and there, that it won’t be a shitshow for everyone. The title story ends in a cautiously upbeat way, and there’s a ...”

“... State; the clergy had to learn the same political rules as everyone else; and bishops could only hope to resist the Erastian ambitions of Crown and Parliament by mobilising the support of lay politicians. Yet a precarious boundary remained visible, behind which bishops clung to their right to define and interpret doctrine. If the Crown threatened that ...”

“... the height of postwar hopefulness that things could change. My editor during those excited days of hope, Christopher Falkus at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, asked me to contribute to a book of essays by women on what they thought had shaped them as women. The Virgin Mary was the single most dominant and crucial element in my female ...”

“... animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed fragments. Nobody seems to be listening. Last year set records: even without counting the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of ...”

“... Rosamund’s Tea Bower, or what?’) A kind and thoughtful woman who has long since ‘given up “hope”’, Miss Roach plainly has it in her to tough out the boarding house, which Hamilton describes with a connoisseurial eye for signs of thrift and grudgingness: the lightbulbs unscrewed to save on electricity, the gratuitously depressing dining-room still ...”

“... it again and again. 2. General Absolution is too much for even a Catholic confessional poet to hope for. 3. That he should resist more firmly the idea that he must be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and ...”

“... styles varying from the aggressively “butch” to the coyly sexy.’ So there you have it. Christopher Booker, to whom I shall come in a moment, goes further, and means it more seriously: ‘Two unfailing barometers of cultural optimism in our century have been the height of buildings and the height of girls’ hemlines.’ This is not only rubbish but ...”

“... He has hitched a ride with two men, a wool trader named Kuzmichov, and a priest called Father Christopher. At the beginning of the journey, as they leave the boy’s home village, they pass the cemetery in which his father and grandmother are buried: From behind the wall cheerful white crosses and tombstones peeped out, nestling in the foliage of cherry ...”

“... he did (it’s not the kind of thing they talked about, when they talked at all), he just seems to hope so. But to a reader she comes across as self-reliant, smart and funny. Just when you’ve had more than enough reflections on why Richard Dawkins is probably, unhelpfully, right, Mrs Barnes steps in with a put-down. As an adolescent I once hid a tape ...”