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“... with the march of France into a terrible war?‘Is there such a thing as an idealist Zola?’ Claire White asks. We find the beginning of an answer in the next sentence: ‘This book argues that Zola was drawn to the idealist imagination more than we tend to assume, and indeed more than he himself would admit.’ He insisted he preferred idealism’s ...”

“... through a trumpet fixed to the motherboard. My time was blonde scraped up in a froth. Now our white hair is arranged against purple. From birth, the agenda of regeneration confuses us. Skip it. I read future time by Attlee as surely as if those clock hands beamed on the wake wall from a light disguised as a camera are snapping facts. All of it is skin ...”

“... Claire Clairmont was, briefly, Byron’s mistress, and the mother of his child Allegra. But was she also Shelley’s lover? Did she become pregnant by him? Did she give birth to his child? From the journals, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking and published in 1986, it seems clear that she was in love with Shelley at the age of 16 ...”

“... Did Shelley have sex with Claire Clairmont? I first heard this central question debated with great solemnity at a meeting of the Byron Society in Albemarle Street way back in 1978. I went with three fellow Shelleyans, Geoffrey Matthews, Claire Tomalin and Judith Chernaik, to hear Marion Stocking talk about Claire ...”

“... of the memorial controversy. The encounter with Alyssa Spier was just a few days past, and for all Claire’s resistance, Spier’s insinuations had slithered inside to coil around Claire’s own doubts. This repulsive, reptilian distrust – it never left her now.’ The snakes of distrust, among other metaphors, have ...”

“... Times during the previous year. Adorno reckoned that the main audience consisted of women, usually white, middle-aged and socially reclusive with obsessive-compulsive tendencies: astrology wasn’t a powerful and mysterious ancient science but a psychological crutch for a disappointed and ageing middle America. After the New Age boom of the 1970s, it declined ...”

“... and probably one of the worst’. After cross-breeding they would eventually become the Large White and Landrace of modern herds. Among these ‘middle-breed’ pigs we may notice Lord of the Wassail, the first middle-breed boar to take a prize at the Royal Smithfield Show. The bristles of his coat were eight and a half inches long (his breeder, a keen ...”

“... opens out from it onto ‘the self-conscious world just being born: that of the rentier and the white-collar workers, of the ladylike wife and the jeune fille bien élevée, of trains and newspapers and morning coffee; a world in which elegance was to be cultivated and yet where taboos and reticences unknown in simpler days were cultivated also.’ Two more ...”

“... with a wickerwork basket strapped to the handlebars and, boldly inscribed on the frame in white paint, the name ROSE ...”

“... accounts. Labourers – most of whom are ex-soldiers – earn less than £5 a day. At some sites a white powder is said to be stirred into their tea, allowing them to work on only a few hours of sleep. At Shire’s open-air gold market, traders were milling about under the midday sun, waiting for Dubai to announce its prices. Brokers haggled over quality ...”

“... object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no particular ...”

“... Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, published five years ago, won praise from critics who know what they’re talking about – for example, Penelope Fitzgerald, writing in the LRB. It was a book that showed an easy technical control, an ability to do the things novelists have to do, and in so young a writer these skills were reasonably thought to presage later and more ambitious performances ...”

“... In the title story of Claire Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, a priest is officiating at a wedding in rural Ireland: the bride is late, the organist has to play the Bach toccata twice, ‘a thrill of doubt’ is ‘spreading through the pews’. She turns up eventually, and the ceremony goes off all right, but an intimation of trouble has been set reverberating in the reader from the very first sentence: ‘Earlier, the women came with flowers, each one a deeper shade of red ...”

“... There are​ many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the morning before the nice things press on her: ‘Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice,’ she says in ‘Morning, Noon & Night’. ‘It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn’t, forget about it ...”

“... in its extent and documentary meticulousness. The catalogue, edited by Paul Gravett and Anne-Claire Norot (with translations by Lili Sztajn), includes a substantial interview and swathes of unpublished material, including sketches made in Paris when Simmonds, as a student, sat for hours in front of a Manet in the Jeu de Paume and carried a tube of red ...”