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“... line, a first-person narrative by the writer himself. The narrative recounts his meeting with the young woman who will become his typist. This structure continues for some twenty pages. Then the page splits into three and the typist gets her own first-person narrative. From now on the three modes occupy almost every page of the novel, although every now and ...”

“... to the north and west as harmlessly or dangerously archaic margins (much as I did as a young tourist), and set out accordingly to placate or subjugate them as circumstances dictated, what lay across the seas to the south and east was another matter altogether. The border with Scotland could be legally abolished in 1707 because for the English what ...”

“... mine,’ Stephen Dedalus thinks while talking to an English priest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The language isn’t the priest’s and isn’t Stephen’s, but the priest talks as if he owned it and Stephen feels he never will. Neither, we may wish to recall, has any other language except those he has learned in school. There are 16 official ...”

“... an amateur Jewish police force composed of local thugs, ‘the Jews’ very own deviants’, as young Philip puts it, sounding very much like his older self. When three Jews get killed in the skirmishing, ‘it wasn’t necessarily because they were Jews’ (‘though it didn’t hurt,’ Philip’s Uncle Monty adds). That ‘necessarily’, along with ...”

“... writes that Péguy ‘was calling for [Jaurès’s] blood: figuratively, it must be said; though a young madman, who may or may not have been oversusceptible to metaphor, almost immediately shot Jaurès through the head’. I used to wonder how figurative the call was; and I was sure the killer was not moved by a metaphor. Now I wonder about the afterlife of ...”

“... Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person lost in her later life. What did I want? Shots of Murdoch at her desk? Walking around, waiting for inspiration? No, just a feeling, on film or in criticism, that the writing, the construction of sentences and the ...”

“... sexual fantasy skits’. She played native girls from the Empire in love with dashing young Frenchmen – a role Baker and Pepito had anticipated in their novel, My Blood in Your Veins, where the heroine’s blood transfusions save a white man’s life. She would repeat it in her variant of Offenbach’s La Créole and in her films of 1933 and ...”

“... In my dealings with him, however, I never found him the ‘semi-housetrained polecat’ that Michael Foot once called him. Back in 1980-81, when he was a junior minister at the Department of Industry and I was covering the mysteries of the Common Market for the Financial Times, I found him an agreeable character with a wry and self-deprecating sense of ...”

“... with Conservative governments. On the other hand, there is no point in threatening with expulsion Young Socialists anxious to be as republican as their forebears. In my opinion, it ill becomes the Labour Party to persecute heretics and rebels. A Labour Party that aspires to become respectable is a Labour Party doomed to decay. That is enough about ...”

“... workers’ control! It is clearly a stirring history and it is easy to see its appeal for the young Australian left-wing idealist. Alienated from his own country, both because of his homosexuality (then illegal in Australia) and because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, and arriving in London at the age of 19 ‘with a single suitcase’, he led a ...”

“... savage gueulade he told the Goncourt brothers he felt he was going to spit blood. But why then, Michael Fried asks, is Madame Bovary positively teeming with assonances, alliterations and repetitions? How is it that after the acid bath of the gueuloir the novel is ‘shot through with precisely the sorts of phonemic effects Flaubert claimed he wished to ...”

“... gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’ These few lines supply the background to Michael Chabon’s novella, which begins thirty years later on the South Downs. The main character is an ‘old man’, once a famous detective, now devoted to his bees. He remains unnamed throughout, but given that he wears an Inverness cape and hunting cap, and ...”

“... King’s chapel was a ‘folie de grandeur’ – the college had, he thought, been hoodwinked by Michael Jaffé, the Rubens expert – and did not suit the chapel’s interior (‘too coloured’). He said that Roger Fry had taught him all he knew about pictures – save ‘my own feelings about them’. Another meeting came about through the ...”

“... in thinking that the rubric was extended to include the words ‘or traditional’. The formidable young McWilliam doesn’t seem to me to fit comfortably under either label. A Case of Knives was a dazzling, burnished, stilt-walking stylistic exercise, like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker ...”

“... description for A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen’s loosely autobiographical account of a not-so-young Russian-American graduate student’s ambivalent year in Putin’s Russia. The novel’s hero – also named Andrei – is similarly torn. From his home in New York he promises his older brother – who has suddenly fled to London after getting on the wrong ...”