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“... this effect visually throughout the film by an odd, veiled gaze which intermittently converts her frank and often beautiful face into a mask of near idiocy, as if she is not only innocent but not quite right in the head. It’s a good thing she doesn’t understand what has happened, since Maxim married her as a little girl lost in the South of France, and ...”

“... meanness, which is perhaps too notorious. Stephen, for example, once let it be thought that he was close to financial ruin, so that Gosse began lobbying to get him a Civil List pension: but it turned out that Stephen was talking only about his current account and not reckoning his securities or his income. His extraordinary tantrums over Vanessa’s household ...”

“... argument place’. This sounds as much like Pascal as Freud (the affinity emerges clearly at the close of the third chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Morton writes: ‘We don’t have a duality of aim and object in common sense.’ But is ‘we want the hunt and not the quarry’ a piece of esoteric psychology? Freud’s theory, Morton ...”

“... when Hemingway is about to take off for Europe with his bride Hadley Richardson. He is 22 and she close to thirty. He has done a good deal of journalism and written some stories, none published. I suppose one justifies the writing of quite long books about a writer before he truly became a writer by arguing that nothing about so great a figure can be wholly ...”

“... Bernard Lovell, who claimed that if he didn’t get the money I was asking for he would have to close down the Jodrell Bank telescopes. Empson at least had the experience of infighting in BBC committees. In my shoes he would not have been intimidated by Sir Bernard, but he might have felt a certain tenderness for the telescopes. He made his inaugural ...”

“... Frank Kermode having now become ‘Sir Frank’, it seems a good moment to take a look back over his remarkable career: though by no means because that career is at an end, for he is producing at such a rate just now that it is quite a job to keep up with him. Very broadly, one can think of his career so far as falling into four stages ...”

“... journalism, Informer 001 can seem jerky – and its substantial revelations are juxtaposed with frank speculation. Yet it is more transparent than many accounts which might be regarded as ‘better journalism’: it eschews the relentless recitation of facts, the slickness and the covert politicking which can characterise the genre. The careless way in ...”

“... Northrop Frye celebrated the literary rediscovery of Scripture in The Great Code, and now Frank Kermode and Robert Alter, two critics who have given a new rigour and seriousness to the ‘Bible as literature’ movement, have brought together a constellation of literary and Biblical specialists, from both sides of the Atlantic, to explain the Bible ...”

“... in 1923, the son of a British Army captain, and sent to Cheltenham College, a public school with close military connections, where he became senior prefect in his house. In 1941 he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics; he spent the last year of the war in the Intelligence Corps, working at the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi. A ...”

“... assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an emotionally unstable man returns from a mysterious stay in a Communist country to shoot the ...”

“... that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank Thompson, whom he knew at Winchester, and who was executed in Bulgaria for fighting with the anti-Nazi resistance. The portrait of Thompson belongs here because it is part of the war, but perhaps also as a contrast with Dyson’s own wartime record, with ...”

“... The autobiographical fragment by Allon White entitled ‘Too close to the bone’, which was published in 1989 in the London Review of Books, has just been republished by the LRB, this time in book form.* Allon taught at the University of Sussex until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ...”

“... is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such uses, established early ...”

“... and proud of her own: some of her ripostes in the conversations she gleefully records are frank to the point of insult. The difference between Cicely and Alma is that Cicely is just any debutante and Algernon just any deb’s delight (though wittier than most). Alma, on the other hand, craved to be ‘a personality’ and no man who wasn’t one could ...”

“... their eyes, others with fangs; some are reactionary, others are rebels; but all are disturbingly close to the mortals they prey on.’ For the most part, she writes in the voice of the resolute historicist (‘there is no such creature as “The Vampire”: there are only vampires’), but sometimes she gives way to an old-fashioned suspicion that there ...”