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“... straitjacket of filth.’ Or David’s wife, far from celebrating the possibility that her husband may have a second chance at a cancer cure, bitterly thinks: ‘No, it will be a second agony.’ These post-anomaly chapters are both the least ‘experimental’, employing traditional psychological-realist plotting and characterisation to elicit genuine ...”

“... and non-Scottish currents; on the other hand, there is a danger that his echt Donnishness may be submerged. The Paterson obsessed with his Alexandrian library, trawling up books, odd facts and titles – the ‘informationist’ Paterson – belongs to a Scottish grouping and tradition whose ancestors include Carlyle’s Professor Teufels-dröckh and ...”

“... hatred of the Nazis was greater than his hatred of ‘the English Empire’.* Eliot and MacLean may be seen as poles apart. What they shared was more important. Each was impelled by a duty to his language, by the necessity of modernising its capacities and fighting its insularities; each was to become a cultural figurehead, the quintessential representative ...”

“... approach for any historian – or for anybody – which believes that, though the Emperor may indeed be wearing some clothes, it is essential to examine them all meticulously in the likelihood that they will turn out to be very much shoddier than he would like them to seem. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War I went to stay with Alan and ...”

“... the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.’ Rather confusingly, this story may not be apocryphal after all. The indefatigable Brunvand reveals that – uniquely – the tale has a genuine source: a report, in 1935, of one rather small reptile beneath the city streets, personally inspected by the New York City Sewer Commissioner. For the ...”

“... point in these diaries that the continuously intimate conversations Khrushchev had with Micunovic may have been part of a design to convince the West that relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were much better than they really were. Refuting this, Khrushchev himself insists that they are simply part of his design to put things between the two ...”

“... school-books, his product is not of the ordinary, useful, though humble kind. What will it be? It may be something of the highest utility; but, on the other hand, it may be something futile, or even harmful because unnatural and untimely. Harvard came to value him, but his career was marked by those key terms, ‘unnatural ...”

“... era ruled. In this desert of greed, vanity and corruption one could always rely on the tonic of Robert Hughes pieces in Time and the New York Review of Books, now collected. He lays about him splendidly, not sparing any link in the chain that tethers artists to their time, from the studio to the dealers and their pimps, and to the final rings in the ...”

“... based on accumulated data that give probabilistic predictions of the correct molecular structure, may exist now, but they didn’t in 1951. The fundamental problem is that, unlike rays of light, X-rays cannot be focused to produce an image, or reflected to produce a mirror image. Yet use them we must, if we want to get down to the architecture of these ...”

“... be a devastating blow at freedom of speech, a disgraceful manifestation of bigotry and fanaticism. May it never happen. Now some less dramatic thoughts about Mr Rushdie’s predicament. His situation is not unique. It is, sadly, shared by many others. His life has been threatened, he has been ‘sentenced to death’ – although the word ‘sentence’ has ...”

“... is followed by an episode with the station manager involving mutual homosexual rape. This – it may be the rediscovered femininity, or a larger failure, including that of Australia and of giving birth to a self – sets the tone of the last part (a triptych-like plan is familiar in Mr White’s novels). ‘She was too disgusted with herself, and human ...”

“... fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous.   In fiction’s grip we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean we may simply float away from our heart’s desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem ...”

“... starring as Rafe Ashton in his former wife Hilda Doolittle’s novel Bid Me to Live (1960), and as Robert Cunningham in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922), he may have had the misfortune to furnish the model for Sir Clifford Chatterley. Aldington’s maledictory novel, Death of a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of ...”

“... He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony between his name and those of Porthos and Athos. Milliners created a ...”

“... detailed and sometimes not-so-detailed arguments have been sharply questioned by the historian Robert Anderson. Davie’s emphasis on the importance of Scottish philosophical writings (among which he includes MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The ...”