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“... and although they never married, and lived separate lives after the Weimar years, he remained close to her for the rest of his life. So far as Walker can tell us, Liszt’s only other romantic attachment during these years was to the remarkable Agnes Street-Klindworth, with whom he had a secret affair in the mid-1850s. Confirmation of this liaison, hinted ...”

“... outwards, to other Masonic brotherhoods. In France, there is now open discussion about Masonry’s close ties to the Socialists and speculation as to the part influential Masons played in the 1981 Elections. (The current French Grand Master is Air Force General Jacques Mitterrand, the President’s brother.) In America, it is widely known that 17 ...”

“... medical care available for the wounded and saw men die. On one occasion he performed so close to enemy lines that he had to raise his voice over gunfire, and when the wind changed the smell of rotting corpses was overwhelming. He threw up in a bucket in the wings and went back on.Courage and determination were as important as a natural wit and a ...”

“... the lives of 230 Berkhamstead boys, had disillusioned him with patriotism.At Oxford, he became close friends with his cousin Evelyn Waugh (both were great-grandsons of Lord Henry Cockburn, the brilliant and lovable judge whose memoirs are a late triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment). Their politics were about as far apart as imagination could stretch ...”

“... We scan them for irony. As Alison Gingeras points out in a catalogue essay, Katz is unusually frank, in modern art-scene terms, in stating the upper-middle-classness of his own milieu.* ‘His is a politics of honesty,’ she claims: if there’s irony anywhere, it’s directed at the self-deluding rhetorics of that art scene. Behind Katz’s affirmation ...”

“... Frank Kermode belongs to no sect of literary criticism, and he has founded no school. Like William Empson, whom he praises as a ‘genius’ of criticism, Kermode has always been more interested in a poetic than in a theoretic approach to the study of literature. He thinks that literature itself – rather than theories about it – is our best guide to how to read critically, and he has devoted the better part of a long career to this conviction ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s new book contains a great deal of graceful and dignified prose, especially in the last chapter, and many of the examples are of great interest. It seems to argue that no history or biography can be believed, but must be regarded as a kind of novel. Any narrative is necessarily incomplete, and the details left out may for some readers be the important ones – what is taken for granted may become the crucial question ...”

“... anti-radical Dostoevsky proclaiming a ‘vision of a democratic church’ that ‘remained close to the socialist ideals which he espoused in his youth’. Tolstoy lived quite near Optina Pustyn (he had sometimes walked there in earlier years), but in 1910, ten days before he died, he left home stealthily and bought a train ticket for the station ...”

“... too few auxiliary craft, in a location and in weather conditions which would have made the process close to impossible even under the most favourable circumstances. (I think this was true, and the complaints justified.) The drafts would start like this: ‘Being as the flotations what you promised int come,’ and continue in the same style. For a while he ...”

“... only for the moment in which one is reading the play or seeing a production. Shakespeare is, as Frank Kermode termed him in a lecture given to celebrate the poet’s 400th birthday in 1964, ‘patient’: he endures because his writing has ‘power to absorb our questions’ and has shown an extraordinary ability to adapt itself to the concerns of each ...”

“... Regrettably, his final statement of the argument, when he discusses Dorothy’s return to Oz in L. Frank Baum’s later books, is contradictory and indefinite: ‘So Oz finally became home ... there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except ...”

“... Skill had been killing Formula One. In the early Nineties, Frank Williams and Renault had together been producing cars that were superior to the rest. The superior drivers wanted to be in them. Williams made more money, and their cars got better. The result was increasingly predictable processions round the circuits ...”

“... us, you see, in their wordless way To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. Lost peoples of Treblinka and Pompeii! ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say, ‘Let the god not abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let ...”

“... Chère Humanité, won the Prix Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France ...”

“... fact. Xavier Herbert tried to meet size with size, insisting that his Poor Fellow My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a frail reader trying to manage it in bed – but a remarkable narrative, animated by an enormous will to do justice to its continental subject. My First university job ...”