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“... barmaid at The Horse and Groom where he has so often been manic or depressive. Before long he has young, polyandrous Virginia in his dead father’s bleak house and she has learned to cite the Book of Ruth, saying: ‘I have washed and anointed myself. Spread your skirt over me.’ All goes merry as a marriage-bell. Never was a tale of depression less ...”

“... in the warrior bands of the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded Rome. The military service of young aristocrats in a lord’s household coincides with the beginnings of vassalage as described by Bloch, originating in an atmosphere heavy with the odour of household bread. The world of chivalry was a world where men were linked to each other by strong ...”

“... studies (while her brother forged ahead) and longed for adventure. In 1924, she joined the German Young Communists’ League and was coshed by a policeman at a demo. Her disapproving parents found her a job in a bookshop, where she was allowed to dust the books but not read them. At nineteen, she joined the KPD, read Die Rote Fahne and kept a Luger hidden ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... on which the American paedophiliac liberationist David Sonnenschien gives advice: ‘Most very young or small kids cannot and should not be penetrated by an adult penis or a dildo. Sometimes a finger is OK, but even with a finger lubrication is recommended. And watch those fingernails!’ On a purely utilitarian calculation the actions imagined here could ...”

“... one point co-founding the Harvill Press. Flora’s husband, a Boys Own Paper sort of chap crippled young by a kick from his horse, was obliquely immortalised by W.H. Auden: Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by ...”

“... need, ‘that very open, honest manner which is never to be trusted’, as Melbourne advised the young Queen Victoria. O’Connell compared Peel’s smile to the silver plate on a coffin. Samuel’s ‘sense of humour’, Beatrice Webb noted, ‘takes the irritating form of tactless irony at the expense of the people he is talking to’. It is a feat to have ...”

“... to him keep shifting. We can’t feel the same way about the weird old man as we do about the shy young dandy, particularly when the dandy is so clearly the guy who lost his wife in the 15th century. And yet we do know it is the same person: given to endless, tender bereavement, fuelled by his finding in Jonathan Harker’s fiancée Mina a replica of his dead ...”

“... It is lifted out, suspended, musing, as in ‘A Morning in Vicenza’: The sun was so fragile, so young, that we were a little scared; a careless move might scratch it, just a shout – if anyone had tried – might do it harm; only the rushing swifts, with wings hard as cast-iron, were free to sing out loud, because they’d spent their brief, uneasy ...”

“... book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national director of the YMHA asked that some possibly libellous references be removed from the manuscript; Seidel refused; the prize was revoked, the original ...”

“... life surely did its bit. An old man, ‘nothing but skin and bones’, offers to carry the young man’s suitcase for 30 centavos. This seems steep to our hero and they settle on three: The old man . . . hung the sandals he was wearing around his neck, loaded the suitcase on his shoulder with a strength that was unbelievable for his bones, and ran like ...”

“... but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first. It’s what she does with her freedom that darkens her world. She knows the money is not exactly to blame, but has to believe, once she has married a man who very ...”

“... How many of our highbrows, for example, the ones who get the lead reviews, write as well as, say, Michael Dibdin, author of the haunting Ratking? P.D. James’s new novel seems to return us straight to Auden’s theology. It is set in rural East Anglia, and takes its title from the Anglican prayer book: ‘We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost ...”

“... in Red River, Ethan Edwards had upped the ante to genocidal.’ But along with Martin Pawley, the young part-Cherokee civilised Indian who joins Ethan in his quest, the audience finds itself caught up in the chase. We may finally break with Ethan, as Martin does, when, discovering that his niece is cohabiting with the Indian ringleader, he determines to kill ...”

“... What I want,’ a young Luis Buñuel announced to the audience at an early screening of his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), ‘is for you not to like the film … I’d be sorry if it pleased you.’ The film’s opening scene, which culminates in a close-up of a straight-edge razor being drawn through a woman’s eyeball, is often taken as the epitome of cinema’s potential to do violence to its audience ...”