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“... Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on ...”

“... of many waters’. In his remarkable new translation of the Pentateuch, a monument of scholarship, Robert Alter eschews ‘face’ to describe the surface of the world at the start of Genesis, and I miss the cosmic implications, but his first two verses amply compensate with their own originality: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and the ...”

“... of this thesis and by the unpredictability of the process he invokes. It is at this point that Alter enters the discussion. His interest lies in the vivid early narratives of the Old Testament, which he describes as fictionalised history. In a world previously dominated by the stereotypes of myth these stories represented the emergence of a new literary ...”

“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he ...”

“... misses that note of implacable hostility which mars the otherwise creative and convincing work of ...”

“... fleeting (as Korda draws it) liaison between Olivier and Kaye, the unmistakable originals of ‘Robert Vane’ and ‘Randy Brooks’: and truth in it? And if there were? Do the recent revelations of Lawrence Durrell’s relations with his daughter alter our attitude to Durrell’s books? Our understanding of them? The ...”

“... of that country’s continuing crisis. The Government has for several years believed that it could alter South Africa from above, moderating the impact of apartheid gradually, and thus forestalling black protest and Western worry. Among its aims has been to co-opt a black middle class through expanding economic opportunity and the gradual relaxation of petty ...”

“... a little aloof (‘a kind of hidden stranger among his New York intellectual peers’, Robert Alter very perceptively said of him, in a slightly different context), was prepared to write the story of his generation. When he had lived long enough and seen enough, when the fates of his contemporaries had played themselves out enough, it fell to ...”

“... form itself and the distinction often erroneously made between form and so-called content (if you alter one, do you not alter the other?), this still does not elucidate the momentum in Beethoven’s music. It is a plausible but rigid intellectual concept that does not clarify the ‘organic’ process by which we feel the ...”

“... leads one to ponder the extent to which one man’s personal gift for unpleasantness can alter the course of party politics. I, for one, shall never again look upon the Conservative split and its aftermath in quite the same ...”

“... The stubborn, hurt, exploring eyes of Jean-Pierre Léaud as ‘Antoine Doinel’, Truffaut’s alter ego, enlist us from the start in his rebellion. But then Truffaut takes an enormous risk. He makes four more films about ‘Doinel’, still using Léaud; and the appealing tough kid from a miserable background turns into a ...”

“... for ever someone else must die. We understand the sequence of life and death by reference to an alter ego, whose biography in a sense we are writing, and to whom we thus come as close as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s ...”

“... was ‘Strength through Boredom’, or by reading one of his tales of the fictional Murdo, part alter ego, part stooge, who was eager to know what magazines Dante had first sent his poems to. The boyish mischief of these pieces was essential to Crichton Smith’s make-up, so that to let it loose was an act of companionable trust and conspiracy rather than a ...”

“... detailed and sometimes not-so-detailed arguments have been sharply questioned by the historian Robert Anderson. Davie’s emphasis on the importance of Scottish philosophical writings (among which he includes MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The ...”

“... This book​ is almost parodically characteristic of Robert Macfarlane’s work. He is a scholar of place – of terrain, terroir, the land – and at times references, sources and citations have bulked uncomfortably large in his writing. Certainly he frequents the countryside at close quarters and often strenuously ...”