“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. The scene is laid in darkness outside Madrid, where the city’s captured defenders face a firing-squad. Some already lie dead, boltered with pink gore; meanwhile, the squad ‘a faceless testudo’ takes aim again. The eye is drawn to a man, arms raised, pleading for his life. A point of suspension between life and death, he effectively sabotages the representation ...”

“... spectacle it afforded: the almost physical manifestation of Trump’s deference to Putin. It may happen again, whether as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the ...”

“... herself told a friend that she thought her gardens were ‘better than her books’. However that may be, they were clearly more ephemeral: one of the most poignant episodes in Lee’s biography concerns Wharton’s devastation when a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1928-29 wiped out virtually everything she had planted at Hyères. ‘How dangerous to ...”

“... would be graceless to grumble; and the cold eye seems disconcertingly aware of what our reactions may be, frequently addressing us as ‘Reader’, with a little flip of the wrist. In any case, the reader interested in the American stage and screen in the Thirties would certainly be gripped by the last quarter of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband ...”

“... in 19½ years, will prevent the Slavery, or Murder, of 100!!’ The mathematical projection may have been rickety, but what houseproud humanitarian could resist a purchase like that? And what housekeeper could fail to ensure that the bowl was always correctly filled? It is well to remember that, in the bloody annals of prized commodities, sugar occupies ...”

“... seems now to evoke so different an atmosphere that I doubt if it is worth reading about: but I may be wrong. There are, of course, the exploration sports, mountaineering, fell-walking, diving, even flying light aeroplanes, where one may yet spin a good yarn based on adventures and achievements in interesting and ...”

“... adverse criticism, but by and large his view of his brother’s work is clouded with stars, if I may put it that way. And anyway, his notion of what poetry is chimes discordantly with mine. ‘Technique is important in poetry only so that it may reveal the supernatural.’ Or, more unevasively still: ‘As Patrick read his ...”

“... I do not know the answer. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent primarily against nuclear attack. They may not deter aggression by ‘conventional’ (i.e. non-nuclear) forces, because in the event of, say, the Soviet Army invading Western Europe, it is not credible that the United States would pull the nuclear trigger, inviting a nuclear holocaust. Yet even here ...”

“... The present commentator refuses to play the game. He recognises Tippett’s genius, even though he may not sufficiently understand it. But he also recognises confusion and vagueness for what they are – an inadequacy. Good or bad, for better or worse, this review isn’t worth your attention unless you accept that there is no substitute for, no viable ...”

“... now recognise, in G.S. Fraser’s anthology Poetry Now (1956). It appeared again that same year in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, and I fear I did not then recognise in it, as I do now, perhaps the finest poem in that volume, and certainly the most surprising. It is, I suppose and hope, well-known: but it isn’t famous – as it deserves to be. It ...”

“... see Auld Reekie,’ Stevenson wrote to his fellow Scottish novelist S.R. Crockett from Samoa in May 1893, eighteen months before his death: ‘I shall never set my foot upon the heather. Here I am until I die and here will I be buried.’ But, as he told another correspondent, his head was ‘filled with the blessed, beastly place [i.e. Scotland] all the ...”

“... of South Africa, which seeks to anticipate almost every conceivable problem and circumstance that may arise in the future. What, exactly, constitutes the ‘equal protection of the law’ guaranteed to citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment? How far may Congress go to promote the ‘general welfare’? The Constitution’s ...”

“... of ‘one life, one writing’, although not at all in the proudly psychopathic sense in which Robert Lowell threw off that phrase. Few writers can have been less disturbed in the psyche than Mrs Gaskell, and the fact suggests the uncomfortable old cliché that virtue and good writing hardly ever go together. With her heart in the right place she wrote ...”

“... you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies. The ashtrays are overflowing. There may be an alcoholic, active or reformed, lying on the living-room sofa. Is he thinking about the pint of whiskey he has hidden under the cushions; or has he just got home from an exhausting AA meeting? He has a job he does not like and is not getting on with his ...”