“... the reader understand all, and hope those you see will forgive each other. In novels Australians may think more than they say. What do Digger and Vic, in The Great World, talk about? Does Vic talk about the money he has made?   ‘Doesn’t ’e talk to you about it?’ he asked Digger.   ‘No. Why should ’e? I don’t know anything about ...”

“... Suez: theirs is the triumphalist tone of the Falklands, taking a robust view of the methods that may regrettably be necessary to govern empires. ‘It was brutal, savage and above all degrading,’ Warner writes with approval of the humiliation of Mahmoud: ‘Kitchener knew exactly what he was doing.’ Royle is less explicit, but he glosses over all the ...”

“... 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 existence of violent, sadistic and resourceful ...”

“... hurts so) possibly be the same thing as insensate molecules rushing around in nerve fibres?’ David Papineau asks. Good question; but one that seems, much like the broom tree, to slip away even as one tries to grasp it. Witness passages like this: There is, of course, a rather different reason for doubting that the semantic power of ‘quasi-phenomenal ...”

“... the customs of a remote tribe. She is keenly aware that, as anthropologists have often done, she may be asking the wrong questions, and relying too heavily on modern analogies or notions. Her task is further complicated because there are no living natives to study or examine. The ancients speak to us, but cannot answer our inquiries; virtually every text ...”

“... unaffected by this kind of attention. His brassiness has the hollow ring of insecurity. Perhaps we may thank Blackmur in part for the largely unfortunate increase in ‘content’ which the 40 Cantos written in the next seven years displayed. Pound had come to intellectual consciousness at the time of Fin de Siècle aestheticism and its hearty aftermath, and ...”

“... assessment came due in 1996 and the old material was viewed by Francis Spufford in his eloquent I May Be Some Time with less animus and a more historically minded cultural analysis, mellowing the harshness of the previous ruling. Scott was perhaps a child of the Romantics, a son of the Sublime, a victim of the need for a large, empty metaphor to redeem the ...”

“... as linguistic. These multiple associations are all incisively reconstructed and investigated in David Fishman’s The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. This is a brief but compact book, divided into two parts that concentrate on two roughly contiguous historical periods: tsarist Russia from the end of the 19th century to 1914, and Poland between the wars. It ...”

“... great pleasure is to be found in this web of connections: how the birth of one of his children may have helped to shape the birth scenes in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, how his revulsion at Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents fuelled an article attacking the Pre-Raphaelites in general, or just why that ...”

“... young Russian couple – Yulia and Vitaly Stepanov – who helped expose a vast doping conspiracy. David Walsh, a sports journalist for the Times with a good record of uncovering cheats (he wrote about his role in exposing Lance Armstrong in his previous book, Seven Deadly Sins), tells their story with the breathless drive of an airport thriller. The ...”

“... ear it seems to combine the words ‘agony’ and ‘anon’, with a hint of ‘agnostic’. It may also remind us of the Greek words for ‘lamb’, and for ‘holy’ or ‘wise’. The echoes are fortuitous, but they are not unapt. For, as David Aberbach shows, Agnon was preoccupied throughout his writing career with ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... often sleep on three legs. Jonathan Wordsworth goes on to warn his reader, with a logic that may escape those unfamiliar with recent Romantic criticism, not to ‘overstress the ordinariness of what is happening’. We, like the peasant, would probably see a horse asleep in the moonlight, whereas Wordsworth ‘points out ... something quite different. We ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... similar imaginings of nuclear war, and we learn in an aside that the central male character of David Plante’s new novel works on a science project related to Star Wars. A lot of writing in the last few years – The Burning Book, The Golden Gate, Or shall we die, Einstein‘s Monsters – shares in a helpless obsession with the nuclear threat: perhaps ...”