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“... Donne, for instance, is celebrated as ‘the greatest English love poet’, and Browning’s The Ring and the Book earns perhaps unexpected praise as ‘one of the all-time wonders of verbal art’.Still, if this book represents a new sort of enterprise for Carey it also brings into play some of his abiding convictions and most characteristic mental ...”

“... mortgage on her home. Fleda, in Queechy, had the same problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work ...”

“... gorgeous and desolating poem, like a conjurer’s display of pulling silks through a ring. There is something characteristically metaphysical about the poem’s enactment of absence (as with ‘And think I am in France’). This wistfulness – beginning with something (‘We spread our things on the sand’) and ending with nothing, though an ...”

“... for live-action family entertainment. But they are big-budget motion pictures: tap them and they ring like money. Great children’s fiction isn’t slick; the film studio’s imperatives of mass audiences and shareholders erode at the difficult edges of a work. The current exhibition at the British Library, Harry Potter: A History of Magic (until 28 ...”

“... belief that all organisms’ behaviours could be attributed to systems of stimulus and response (ring bell, dog salivates), behaviourists had little need for germ plasm, cheerfulness factors or heritability. Perhaps more significant, studies of the biological bases of psychological traits came into stark disrepute in the 1930s and 1940s owing to their ...”

“... way in which he strings an exotic sketch of a minor character along a rope of exile. Stein in Lord Jim, for instance, with his collections of butterflies and ‘catacombs of beetles’, is said to have taken part in the revolutions of 1848, then fled to Trieste, and then to Tripoli, ‘with a stock of cheap watches to hawk about’. Bezmozgis is similarly ...”

“... but a syndrome, need no longer suspect itself of hypochondria. Sue Townsend’s descriptions ring true, the word is out: kids, parents, pets and geriatrics are all in this mess together. Children take to the books partly, I gather, because the disgusting details of Adrian’s spots, the mention of his wet dreams and of his regular measuring of his ...”

“... Thesiger belonged to the second category. He read the novels of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Jim Corbett’s tales of tiger hunting, Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, Blackwood’s Tales from the Outposts, Jock of the Bushveld, Henri de Monfreid’s account of smuggling across the Red Sea, Churchill’s The River War and, of course, The Seven Pillars ...”

“... male confessional, as practised by the bestselling novelist Gary Sayles, whose bibliography should ring some bells: Our Legendary Twenties was about a single twentysomething professional Londoner looking for love. Cutting the Cake concerned itself with a late twentysomething professional Londoner unsure whether or not to move in with his ...”

“... front door and, when exhausted, even offered money to passing schoolchildren to take it in turn to ring the door bell. One night well after midnight, some friends who lived opposite lured the smaller night shift of newspapermen away momentarily, while she and her family ran quickly across the mews into a friend’s house (they had left the door on the latch ...”

“... Sadly, it’s not between the aluminium covers of Sex. Before I’d laid eyes on the first nipple-ring, I read: ‘by the way, any similarity between characters and events depicted in this book and real persons is not only purely coincidental, it’s ridiculous. Nothing in this book is true.’ I might as well have closed the book there and then, but I’d ...”

“... then goes to take a bachelor holiday on a Riviera beach. Among the sea stones he finds a valuable ring, and decides to make use of it through an advertisement. The dénouement is admirably done, and the author seems rather disconcertingly at home in it, as if easing herself with a holiday from normal duties and commitments. Connoisseurs of the short story ...”

“... spotted first by the owner of Mallard’s diner, who bursts back into his restaurant with a ring of sweat around his neck, causing breakfasters at the counter to look up from their grits and eggs. The Vignes twins are remembered, if at all, as ‘selfish girls running from responsibility’, who, after leaving home, left each other too, ‘their lives ...”

“... and again that chattel slavery was replaced ‘by subjugation enforced by law’ – that is, by Jim Crow. The South did not learn the lessons of its defeat by the North in 1865 as the Germans did of theirs by the Allies in 1945.If the ‘truth’ about the Civil War is still not established it isn’t for lack of effort by historians and teachers. Not since ...”

“... Pérez de Cuéllar. Serious believers might wish that Hopkins would stop telling this story after Jim Schnabel described the follow-up in his book Dark White. † Richard and Dan started following Linda around and finally abducted her themselves. They brought her to a beach house, forced her to wear a nightie, ducked her in the surf, threw away her wedding ...”