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“... The Christian myth is the classiest ‘family romance’ of all. For the most part, Dr Liebert marks his speculations very fairly as such. They are not, however, very exciting speculations. His is a rather foursquare ‘psychoanalytic study’, unlikely to disturb anyone’s feelings or, indeed, many people’s conception of Michelangelo. He describes the ...”

“... but feared as the carriers of socialism, sedition and racial pollution. The onset of the Cold War marks a third major shift, as a massively bureaucratic national-security state conjures up, not a dangerous working class, but the invisible agents of the international Communist conspiracy. It could be argued, against Rogin, that these three phases mark quite ...”

“... of birds were always important in Green, and the beautiful description of starlings at sunset here marks their last appearance. With them disappear those lyrical effects which he decided to shelve in favour of the almost continuous dialogue of his last two books. Green’s defence of this policy in broadcast talks and elsewhere features largely in the last ...”

“... Europe. The strange, perhaps ultimately incomprehensible mixture of dissidence and collusion that marks the careers of so many intellectuals in Stalinist societies, now so harshly judged, might be viewed a little more sympathetically with O’Faolain in mind. His example reminds us that lies, evasions, ambivalences, failures of courage, are just as much the ...”

“... exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene. How we dress now is a subject that engages semioticians, social historians, political analysts and gender theorists – ‘fashion civilians’, in the words of Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman – as well as superstar ...”

“... as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black ...”

“... some thoughts together ‘either for a pamphlet or for Fraser’ (i.e. Fraser’s Magazine) marks the first, deceptively casual, appearance of the activity which was to transform Arnold’s life. It was through writing polemical and critical essays for the periodicals that he was, within a few years, to become famous in his own right. And it was through ...”

“... had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as financial records. In the course of examining ...”

“... in any part of the world, almost; with its church, its wine-shop, its smithy... This bore all the marks of a mountain village.’ Faithful to this intuition of the typical nature of the village, we will find the inhabitants designated according to their typical roles – the priest, the vintner, Abel the weaver. The purpose of this strategy is well vindicated ...”

“... to see, and it appears that such a woman is an evolutionary throwback, bearing on her body the marks of an original fusion with the world which preceded civilisation and colonisation: Reaching the gate, he crosses the park and goes past the camellias in the garden to a certain window, where he wipes the pane free of fog and then stands transfixed as ...”

“... be the promised reward of our reading. It is the no less imaginary ‘quincunx’ of trees which marks the site of the treasure: in other words, the structure of freely circulating symbols which both creates the fictional lure and negates its reality. As Durrell well understands, paranoia is the indispensable aid of the writer of fiction. We would not strive ...”

“... to overwhelming poverty. As such, these habits were widely pitied, when not deprecated, as marks of degeneration. At no point did anyone consider that they might constitute something approaching a ‘tradition’. If the Okies had a culture, it can have been nothing more than – to borrow a phrase from a brilliant essay by Lawrence Levine – ‘the ...”

“... works, Ulysses revolves on a botched revelation or bungled epiphany, as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally meet to no momentous effect. Nothingness is a traditional topic of Irish writing, all the way from the negative theology of the great medieval schoolman John Scottus Eriugena to the vision of hell of Flann O’Brien’s The Third ...”

“... Stephen L. Carter has written the kind of novel in which the bad guys say ‘very well’ when they mean ‘OK’; in which the hero calls a visit from old friends ‘a delightfully rambunctious affair’ and his rocky marriage a ‘tumultuous mutuality’; in which ‘homes’ are ‘spacious’, jealousy ‘flames afresh’ and eminent legal scholars spend dinner parties debating the existence of God ...”

“... she might as easily have been a scientist, like her father (an entomologist) or her brother Stephen (an astrophysicist). She shares her father’s despairing ecological awareness, together with her brother’s logically detached interest in the nature of time. Both concerns are evoked in childhood memories of strenuous field trips in the Canadian ...”