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“... of a bedside table defaced by cigarette burns. This fantasy has some bearing on the task facing David Sylvester in writing this marvellous book. He has discovered a room behind the wardrobe. In 1912, Magritte, 13 at the time, lost his mother who, after several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, managed to drown herself. According to Magritte’s ...”

“... profession. Time has not decided the matter. A row of paintings by Copley, Hoppner and Opie may be dashing but you can tire of them before you are sated with Vigée Le Brun’s pretty frocks and bright eyes. And of these there is no shortage: she was prolific. She drove herself and sometimes she said she had spread herself too thin, but it is pretty ...”

“... be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet had found few opportunities for action, but ‘as a dog may have its day’, so perhaps her time would come ‘to declare it in deeds’, rather than only in words. It was May 1549 and too early for Elizabeth even to imagine a significant political role for herself. These were ...”

“... as precious stones.’ The ambition is breathtaking, its objects less so. I would like to believe David Erdman that even Pitt guiding Behemoth is meant as Satanic allegory, with its naked British hero putting, as always, an angelic face on Chaos and Non-Entity. But I have my doubts. Perhaps the verdict of time on the Pitt and Nelson pictures – the one, to ...”

“... of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000). Faced with the prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon’s Army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut, supposedly to keep order, and two days ...”

“... Now that Updike’s an elder statesman in the world of letters, an elfin figure pared down to a David Levine caricature of himself, a newer generation of detractors (replacing the ones that died off) has reserved him a room at the retirement home and seems irritated that he won’t take the hint. In recent interviews and articles he acknowledges the testy ...”

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

“... be as secure as ever, especially within and radiating out from academic circles: that is, if one may judge by the number of recent books, articles, monographs, studies, memoirs and so on listed in the Bibliography and Notes of this impressively thorough record of the life and work of one of the most disconcerting novelists in the history of fiction, whom ...”

“... words were generated by the celebrated youngish American novelist, journalist and story-writer David Foster Wallace. Although willing to tilt at shiny targets of grammatical contention (the ending of sentences with prepositions etc), Wallace was, for the most part, hunting bigger game: America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone.That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the chances of intelligent life developing on Earth were ...”

“... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...”

“... the question of whether or not they should have been published at all. But such doubts as she may have had, and conquered, have apparently nothing to do with the amount of coverage her mother’s life needs or justifies. She obviously feels the subject is inexhaustible. Many readers might disagree. We already have Antonia White’s sequence of unashamedly ...”

“... than under Tyrants. Everyone knows that democracies, though they clothe themselves in virtue, may get travestied by the inwardly vicious. Everyone also suspects himself, as Scott Fitzgerald noted, of possessing at least one cardinal virtue. Where politicians continually have to flatter a demos that sees them as clay-footed, each citizen, banjaxed and ...”

“... Andrea Lee remarks in passing she could well investigate at large. She joins the marchers in the May Day parade and shares their exhilaration, feeling ‘a wild, childish excitement’. Yet without explanation her report turns hostile: ‘The rain began to come down harder, and still the monstrous, disorganised spectacle went on, inspiring joy in no one I ...”