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“... the brilliant but undeniably odd writer, X. Trapnel. The speed with which the voracious ice-queen, Pamela Widmerpool, bolts from her husband to live in penury with Trapnel is a tribute to his late friend’s remarkable effect on women; Maclaren-Ross may have lacked funds, but he was never short of adoring women. ‘People think because a novel’s invented, it ...”

“... the end of another era of French philosophy suddenly seems imminent. Jean-Paul Sartre died long after the Existentialist era had dwindled, and that phase of his philosophical work had been absorbed. Like Jacques Lacan’s death, however, Foucault’s comes at a point where debate has not settled the question of either the viability of his vision or the ...”

“... Mexico.’ The stake-out that forms the climax of Dog Soldiers recognisably draws on the six-week-long Pranksters/Hells Angels ‘Trips Festival’ that is one of the set-pieces of Wolfe’s book, relocated by Stone from La Honda, California, to a border-village in Mexico; similarly, the character of Dieter in Dog Soldiers is in part based on the Kesey of ...”

“... in the non-imperial sense) who were called the Cruthin and who existed in Ulster long before the 17th-century settlement. He also emphasises his Ulsterness by having a photograph of the statue of Cuchulain in the GPO above his desk. Cuchulain is an authentically Ulster hero in a way that Carson – a Dubliner who privately despised the ...”

“... time for having a conversation’.) Senior acknowledges that more affordable childcare would go a long way to alleviating pressure on working parents but doesn’t press the point with much vigour. Her focus instead is on what parents themselves can do to improve their lot. Her first recommendation is that mothers and fathers – particularly mothers ...”

“... The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting obedient attention from each new generation of students, but this form of academic perpetuity does not extend to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour ...”

“... life are of much more importance to recent British history than liberal empiricism has allowed. Pamela Horn’s study is thorough, sensible social history by a scholar who has delved into a vast range of primary sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane Lewis have had to depend while ...”

“... The Soundys were poor but they were not feckless, and they weren’t vagrants. Having been long settled in Battersea they had no wish to take themselves back to Pangbourne, but by the terms of the Old Poor Law of 1601, with amendments in the 1660s and 1690s, they ‘belonged’ to Pangbourne, where they began (they may even have had a settlement ...”

“... deeds. The one precluded the other: he held government office for a relatively short time over a long political career, largely because of what he said, or the way he said it. The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 ended his front-bench career and remains a focus of scrutiny. It was the speech at once of a politician on the stump and a classicist on the ...”

“... provincial gentility. Private pleasure gardens attached to noble houses and royal courts have a long history, but Vauxhall Gardens, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames in 1661, might well have been the first commercial pleasure garden in Europe. The business flourished for two centuries, finally closing in 1859. Vauxhall’s special status, Alan ...”

“... gaze, leer or stare. ‘I did not want to be judged by my body, my beauty, or the lack thereof,’ Pamela Taylor, who wears the hijab, explains, ‘but as an individual, for my personality, my character and my accomplishments.’ Many Saudi women, Maliha Masood writes, are aware that the veil denies ‘men their usual privilege of discerning whomever they ...”

“... uncomfortable is its unusual length: the spare narrative of mutual deception is fleshed out with long appeals from the woman to be allowed off the tower, and long speeches in return by the scholar. And as these conversational exchanges add flesh to the skeleton of the tale, so the literal flesh of the lady is scorching ...”

“... even cosy, and I suspect that critics, who have given Osborne such a consistently hard time for so long, heaved a sigh of relief at this autobiography, since it was something, to quote another John’s spoof of Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘to be read behind closed doors’. Though without necessarily taking Orton’s other piece of advice – namely, to ‘have a ...”

“... into an engraving of a country house and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with ...”

“... happens in this favola intreccio. Arcadia, part of a vaguely defined Greek confederation, has for long been peacefully governed by Duke Basilius, who, misled by the Delphic oracle, goes against the advice of his trusty counsellor, Philamax, and abdicates (or takes a year’s pastoral sabbatical), while locking up his daughters, ...”