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“... life. Failing that, writers might agitate for pre-publication advances closer to the Martin Amis mark, though I doubt that they’d get them. On the face of it, a greater stress on ‘moral rights’ is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in practical terms, it means is that an author can still object to mistreatment of what remains ‘his’ work in ...”

“... when my dream was near the moon, the crux left of the watershed, and the stars that usher evening rose. He is not here; but far away – o’er Bodley’s dome his future labours spread. ‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’ Men shut their doors against a setting sun, and high the mountain-tops, in cloudy air, and instantly ...”

“... It’s hard To put my finger on the precise reason why. It’s not as though something ominous rose From the sidewalks or Hell’s Angels cycles Were parked outside the luncheonette. Nothing like that. Nor can I say why, even though there was almost No one on the street, I felt watched. While I slept fitfully in the tilt-back bucket seats, Someone ...”

“... about – as people actually did, walking on Commercial, when they saw the harbour bathed in rose. Weeks now, on the spire of the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, a red scaffolding’s ringed the crown, square-boned New England earnestness gaining a jaunty bit of costume: our spire disguised, for the season, as a minaret, or a lighthouse in ...”

“... he would ‘survive not as an individual, but as the representative of a little world of 1914’.Mark Hussey valiantly attempts to show that Bell’s life and career amount to more than just one good book, but although Bell wrote much more on art and culture that remains entertaining reading, he never really refined or developed his early position. His final ...”

“... risky. Twenty-five-year-old Philip Benjamin brings himself to tell his parents, Owen and Rose, that he is a homosexual. Owen, the father, then comes to find the courage to tell, first, Rose, and then, in the novel’s final scene, Philip as well, that he, too, is a homosexual. ...”

“... the past five years, ten thousand a week, half a million a year. In fact he is often way off the mark. It’s explained to him that the average monthly salary in Bulgaria is double what he says it is, and the poverty level roughly half. But not being sure of the figures is a rhetorical advantage: ‘How many take advantage … no one knows. The Home Office ...”

“... instance, by the distance between ‘catarrhs’ and ‘guitars’:Then from their poverty they rose,From dry catarrhs, and to guitarsThey flittedThrough the palace walls.Here the incessant rumbling wooings of the gaunt guitarists gradually unite with the women’s insistent erotic dreaming, physically expressed by their ever more extravagant coiffures, to ...”

“... our knives ghosted through. Then, she’d pick from lifted trays, like any marketeer, fenestrated rose transparencies to mark (under ‘peel’) from ten. On the tables blue bowls of vanilla slices, each purse of six cloves relaxing in the ovens’ pre-heat. Breaking the drought Not counting the last tank’s thirty ...”

“... Nervousness and nostalgia mark these three novels. The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant ...”

“... how finally to come to be at its mercy, emerges again in the appalling clarity of The Fate of Mary Rose. The male narrator, Rowan Anderson, is a historian, albeit one with the right kinds of ‘sympathy’: he is engaged on the biography of a woman engineer who contributed to the war effort against German Zeppelins by developing a powerful arc lamp. Anderson ...”

“... to declare their belief that Jesus died, was buried, descended into hell, and on the third day rose again. Paul explains that the requirement is reasonable: provided the dead can rise, there can be no reason to suppose Jesus did not do so. In fact if he didn’t, ‘we are of all men most miserable.’ Like Paul, the creeds also insist on ‘the ...”

“... World. Post-Structuralists have turned to Africa and the Caribbean; the feminist critic Jacqueline Rose, who is also Jewish, has turned in this collection of Clarendon Lectures to Israel and South Africa; and the odd middle-aged Marxist has discovered a stomping-ground in Ireland, which if not exactly Third World hovers somewhere around the one-and-a-half ...”

“... to him about his self-absorption, he has eyes only for the way an apprentice had scrimshandered a rose’s exquisite petals not from some precious metal or wood or stone (‘I might just as well be eating alone’) but the tail-end of a carrot. The excessiveness of the poem’s final line both clinches the performance and dismantles the artifice. The carrot ...”

“... the converse of his famous ancestor. Even allowing for party rancour, Swift was not far off the mark when he accused her of ‘sordid avarice, disdainful pride and ungovernable rage’. Mary Wortley Montague, who counted herself a friend, described Sarah as ‘eternally disappointed and eternally fretting’. Labels like ‘virago’ and ‘termagant’ may ...”