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“... materialised on the bride’s finger, but the ocular proof backfired when the nuns noticed yellow marks on the adjoining fingers: was it plausible that Jesus had given his beloved a cheap imitation? Two nuns who spied on Benedetta through a hole in the study door saw her renewing her stigmata with a large needle. And, most telling of all perhaps, the saintly ...”

“... rhetoric of those pieces also aggrandises the maker. They haven’t the humility which marks, for example, the Gothic sculpture Rodin admired. His work is at the service of his genius, not of the story. Touch is manifested by marks fingers made in the clay as they modelled a cheek, a mouth, the curve of a ...”

“... trust in simple if well-phrased description and too little concern for its narrative function also marks Rose Boyt’s much briefer story of another Rose. Rose’s first fifty pages offer short scenes from childhood – first at sea in the Baltic and then in Trinidad – in which an appropriate and vivid naivety of style combines effectively with exactness of ...”

“... driving up a ramp. In common with the vehicles of the other booze-cruisers, ours was shown to its marks on the car-deck without going through a single check. A giant hoarding in the dock was flashing up an advertisement for Beers Are Us, Calais. The ferry operators, perhaps nettled by frequent taunts that they manage gin palaces, have opted to go up-market ...”

“... European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, gives a single judgment which sometimes shows the brush marks of several painters and sometimes bears the scars of compromise. The practice of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is perhaps better: a majority view, laying down the law, will be set out in a single judgment, and each judge is then free to ...”

“... trading-floor is fully up and running, but the process begins back in Ulysses. ‘The problem,’ Stephen tells Buck Mulligan after Buck scolds him for trying to trade Shakespearean theory for a bit of English coin, ‘is to get money.’ Should they solicit it, he sarcastically asks, from the milkwoman who’s just passed by? She takes money from them and ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... the age of his own daughter, women who take pleasure in pain – ‘I like of his upon me whatever marks he’s made’ (early in their relationship he refuses her request to sodomise her, then at the end relents). Or even for seeing this as a betrayal of the first novel, whose unnamed narrator, after a lifetime of abuse and the sexual self-harm which is its ...”

“... a Rorschach blot. Meaningless blobs are sinister – perhaps because they look like significant marks when they are not. It is not extravagant to find something of the pitiful dignity of Rembrandt’s ox in the pieces of meat, but unease bred by lack of specificity in the human figures suggests that if their function is priestly it is also nasty. (This is ...”

“... I regard as almost his most triumphant book the one which his true disciple, Paul Theroux, thinks marks the great falling-off: The Enigma of Arrival. This is a book about Naipaul having stopped writing. He is living in Wiltshire within a stone’s throw of a large house in which a scarcely-disguised Stephen Tennant is, like ...”

“... were able to offer the soldiers, but I doubt if it was a match for whatever it was that left entry-marks in its masonry the size of small soup plates. Two people died on the premises, their former neighbours told us. Tension was rising in the city. There were reports that the Burundian Government now backed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and was supplying the ...”

“... originated in the 18th century and which ‘by extending its influence across much of the world, marks the first phase of universal history’. This is a big claim, which he seeks to defend to the extent that it explains the world that has been emerging since 1989 – the world of neoliberalism which recognised that ‘markets, far from being ...”

“... own book. He puts a new idea of his own into both of these books, and it urgently needs refuting. Stephen, he says (Kenner’s Ulysses, p. 152), is practically blind all through the book; his eyes without his glasses focus eight inches in front of his nose, and he broke them ‘yesterday’. This proves that whenever he claims to see anything he is only ...”

“... in overwhelming detail in Ulysses, for many the greatest novel of the century. This year, however, marks the 75th anniversary of publication – and the 75th Bloomsday – which accounts for the unprecedented number of readings, concerts, lectures, dramatisations and re-stagings, all accompanied by commemorative breakfasts, lunches, dinners and receptions of ...”

“... other universities. Rosenbach is the crucial holding, its holograph notation, as Gabler says, ‘marks a decisive point of consolidation in the compositional development’. But it doesn’t solve every textual problem. For one thing, Rosenbach is ‘full of erasures indicating revisions during the fair-copying’. For another, Joyce continued to work on ...”