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“... One theme of this book is that there are significant psychological differences between the sexes.’ The trouble is that from where we are standing the task of distinguishing differences which are or might be programmed, differences due to learning, and differences which are not differences but stereotypes is not operationally feasible. Dr May does not attempt it ...”

“... not with other human beings but with green screens, fax machines and modems. Graham Coster and Alex Comfort have each written a Condition-of-England novel for the Yuppie age, but they have handled the task in diametrically opposite ways. Coster’s protagonist, Greg, forsakes his computer terminal and takes a job in a youth hostel in the Lake ...”

“... Alex Comfort​ was exhausting. After meeting him, the pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson swapped notes. ‘If we could learn to produce on a 24-hour level the way he does, I think we’d probably have it made,’ Johnson said. ‘Five or six hours is all I can stand,’ Masters replied ...”

“... and even bracing fashion by Proust, in a particular connection, one glossed coarsely by Alex Comfort: ‘With better things in hand,/No one would dip a pen’ – let alone complete an enormously lengthy novel. No doubt it has frequently served as a pleasing extenuation of male infidelity; and also as a decent subject (you couldn’t dwell long ...”

“... become pieties would, presumably, be the lesson of any history of historical misrepresentations. Alex Comfort’s Imperial Patient is a reexamination of the life of the Emperor Nero, who has suffered more from historical misrepresentation than most. A standard modern reference book will tell us that, ‘after a promising start’, Nero murdered his ...”

“... of fives. On his way out of the teller pit, the man rubbed the shoulder of one of the tellers to comfort her and said to another as she unlocked the door letting him out to the lobby: ‘Thanks for your co-operation.’ One of his accomplices, tasked with raiding the vault, had got two managers to open it for him and found $200,000 inside. ‘I need a ...”

“... triumphs of the book is a pair of parody rustics who seem to have stepped straight out of Cold Comfort Farm – until we realise that that is the effect they are after, that the parody is theirs, not the author’s. ‘He don’t know no secrets,’ one of them says, provoking a London woman to a mock complaint about rural double negatives, ‘and he ...”

“... of personality and emotion, is intimately bound up with socially-constructed notions of maleness. Alex Owen’s solid and compelling new book makes it clear that the tenets of science’s disreputable sister, spiritualism, became just as entangled with ideas of gender. Spiritualism may be understood as an elaborated expression of Victorian thinking about what ...”

“... ears. Something vital has gone wrong and they must take account of it. ‘I have the feeling,’ Alex Cleave declared in Banville’s last book, Eclipse, ‘the conviction, I can’t rid myself of it, that something has happened, something dreadful, and I haven’t taken sufficient notice, haven’t paid due regard, because I don’t know what it is.’ This ...”

“... not have sought out the despairing woman – but he still watches in ‘ecstasy’ and offers no comfort. Is this the Mystery, that the spectacle we like to watch is the misery of others? Whitman and Fuckhead are both voyeurs, responding to the purity of a sufferer’s emotion. ‘Write naked. Write in blood. Write in exile,’ Johnson once demanded in a ...”

“... buyer beware’) who is terminally ill. For eight months she hides her prognosis from her husband, Alex, and their children. She tells nobody except ‘a fat magpie’, a habit of secrecy formed during childhood; she spent years keeping bad news from an abusive father whose rancour still rings in her ears. Eventually, she collapses and an ambulance brings ...”

“... The epigraph to Drinking Coffee Elsewhere comes from Alex Haley’s Roots: ‘The histories have been written by the winners.’ The implication is that this collection will give us the voice of the losers. But ZZ Packer looks like an outsider only if you concentrate exclusively on racial identity. She went to Yale and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop ...”

“... double. Another historical pattern was that we haven’t beaten Sweden since 1968. But that’s no comfort going into the Argentina game. We haven’t beaten them since 1966. 5 June. Germany 1 Ireland 1. Have to go out today, so set the video to tape the game and take steps not to hear the result until getting home (i.e. leave the car radio at home on ...”

“... viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did; if a cat’d let me kiss it, I’d kiss it – Cat on a fence I’ll kiss it ...”

“... acquiring loyal patrons – but that way, they merely institutionalise themselves as peddlers of comfort to rich sponsors and contributors, and do nothing to solve the problems they appear to acknowledge. Edwards advocates a radical alternative in which the fashionable ideas of civil society and ‘good governance’ make them radically accountable, as NGOs ...”