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“... Simulacrum’, which Andrew Hurley translates as ‘The Mountebank’, a man arrives in a small village in northern Argentina and exhibits a blonde doll in a cardboard box which serves as her coffin. People file by, offering their condolences, addressing the man as ‘General’. He shakes their hands, murmurs a platitude, and they drop their two ...”

“... results of population censuses are usually kept secret, because governments are embarrassed by the small number of native inhabitants and their overwhelming dependence on foreign workers. There was a census covering Dubai which would have helped businessmen like Ahmed four years ago. ‘What were the results?’ he asks. ‘I’d love to know. It’s ...”

“... a relief after the preternatural proportion he has attracted of duds and dunces. She seems to have small impulse to create literature herself. Her points are more correct than telling, and she seldom builds them into an argument. When it is not directly quoting, her book is heavyish going. It is written with surprising barbarism. People decline from ...”

“... his point of view, the fall of France improved matters, because his parents carried him off to a small spa near Montluçon in the unoccupied zone. Néris was full of Jewish refugees, French and foreign, and full of rumours about their future. When it was clear that all the foreigners would be deported, Paul’s parents appealed to an acquaintance to hide ...”

“... 48, went off to America for three and a half years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was 12-year-old Anthony. Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community – Nashoba – in ...”

“... story. He meets Shelley Bovey, the woman who runs the Fat Acceptance movement, and Dawn French and Helen Teague, who have a clothes range for big women (he interviews Teague; French refuses, her publicist saying she prefers to ‘concentrate on the label, rather than the issue of size’). He flies to New York to interview Robert Atkins a few weeks before ...”

“... confused and often unhappy. But she’s learned from her mother not to settle for anything small, and she sets out to invent her own life. The instinct that attracts her to glass is sure: she knows ‘that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish ...”

“... Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg ...”

“... patronage which drove the Modernist enterprise, and much of her life was consumed in fretting over small bills. Despite her troubles, she read and wrote to a rigorous schedule, and never touched a drink before 6 p.m. In 1921 she published ‘Speed the Plough’, a short story about a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, and a minor masterpiece. Her first ...”

“... It’s just that this verdict is passed on The Miracle Worker (1962) of all films. When Helen Keller made her first communication with another human being, it wasn’t a lot like selling out a considered political position. What it was like was a painful birth, and Arthur Penn’s film doesn’t play down the pain of her entering into language. The ...”

“... with his poetry, that of Vermeer, and Vermeer’s paintings and interiors! One of the editors, Helen Deese, writes a highly perceptive essay on the relation of Lowell’s poetry to the visual arts, but she seems to take it for granted that the Vermeer analogy invoked, for example, in Lowell’s ‘Epilogue’ is a natural and normal one. It seems to me ...”

“... journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are firmly out. Pauline Réage is not given the benefit of the gender doubt. There is a noticeable favouritism towards the French experimental novel but indifference ...”

“... city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism.’ This was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings ...”

“... have to sit amidst the silence listening to the snapping of threads.’ Dissidence plays a fairly small part in Klima’s preoccupations, which are more existential, both more private and more universal. The ‘threads’ to which he refers are those of the ‘net’ of relations which he, or his narrator, for ‘none of the characters in this book – and ...”

“... available from the social setting. A child of eleven or twelve was moved from family life in a small hovel to semi-institutional life in the great house of Mellerstain, an experience of new people, a new physical world, new tasks and a new level of discipline: no wonder flight home seemed attractive. Discipline, though, does not seem to have been very ...”