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“... abroad. The Chronology at the front is as full as one could ask for, the notes at the back rather fuller. Whether this volume will turn out to contain the whole of Sarraute, we must wait to see. For word is that she is writing still, every day, her one concession to her great age being to do so at home rather than the café tables she once liked to work ...”

“... anti-Marxist either. He simply thought that the more ideas and beliefs there were about, the fuller and saner life became. He has, very properly, a long entry in the Handbook of Russian Literature: longer than Turgenev’s, I note, which will disgust the traditionalists – the editors have smiled on literary theory. Anyone who wants to understand just ...”

“... and critics’. Over sixty directors agreed to vote (including Boetticher, Boorman, Frears, Fuller, Greenaway, Polanski, Wilder and Zinneman), as did about twenty producers; only one actor agreed; in the spectator class there were about ten programmers and nearly forty critics, all of them contributors to Time Out. The results were published last ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... this sense, Marx’s work belongs to an aesthetic critique of capitalism running from Schiller and John Ruskin to William Morris and Herbert Marcuse. Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... addressing himself to Irish history and contemporary politics ought always to bear in mind John Stuart Mill’s provocative remark, that it was not Ireland but England that was the exception: ‘Ireland is in the mainstream of human existence and human feeling and experience; it is England that is one of the lateral channels.’ Of the authors under ...”

“... the J.C. Squire literary atmosphere, which Dunn summons up by a pretence of       being a John Buchan of the underdog With my waistcoated breast puffed against the wind. And yet however well organised it is, much of the overt ‘feeling’ in these poems, as in many of those in the anthology, remains second-hand, not truly sui generis; and the reason ...”

“... John Cage, who died immediately after this book intended to honour his 80th birthday was published, was a man marvellously indulged and humoured. Perhaps no one among 20th-century buffoons accumulated so much intellectual capital or secured such wide forbearance, and few have been so famous. He was included in every reckoning of modern music’s development and achievement and granted a potent influence on artists in diverse media and of all ages ...”

“... juicy details have now largely been dropped, though the analysis of constituency results is still fuller than it is in Britain. In fact, Le Monde now brings out no fewer than three companion volumes, the Guides du pouvoir: in 1997 a 128-page set of biographies of all 577 Deputies, a further 128-page analysis of the make-up of the various cabinets ...”

“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

“... and, thinking fast, said he had merely been conducting research to enable him to make a fuller and more informed speech in the Lords. Inside the Houses of Parliament the subject of homosexuality had been largely ignored until Arran proposed his Bill on 12 May 1965, with a speech which in certain sections sounded like an attack: ‘our ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in ...”

“... effective, it’s true, but not particularly clandestine either (the journalist and historian John Prebble’s experience was identical); and by June 1944 large parts of the Army had developed from an anti-Fascism more consciously deliberated than ever Churchill’s was, through a famous browned-offness, to something like specifically socialist war ...”