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“... in typography suggests, purports to be a posthumously discovered manuscript by Eugene Allen, a young Vietnam veteran who committed suicide in 1974. ‘Hystopia’ fills out the vast bulk of its namesake, nestling against the inner edges of the outer story with the snugness of a matryoshka doll. The forty or so pages of paratext that bridge the two books ...”

“... city, next to some dilapidated Soviet-era government buildings. When I arrive one of a number of young and beautiful receptionists leads me to the floor on which Sergei and his leadership team sit. She hands me over to Sergei’s equally young and beautiful PA, who takes me straight to his office. ‘The problem,’ Sergei ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie ...”

“... Ibsen wrote them is a warning against reading the art too readily from the life, and one that Robert Ferguson has not heeded. For him, the life is the only way to support his thesis, which is that the great plays aren’t great at all, and that after Ibsen’s first success, Peer Gynt (written at Casamicciola, Ischia, in 1867), it all went horribly ...”

“... Monterrey cigars and giant spiders; a menacing black servant with eyes glowing like coals; a naked young woman supine on a stone altar, breasts heaving, knife raised over her throat. But only a minority of his novels involve devil-worship; Baker’s title ties together the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social ...”

“... in the late stories of Margaret Oliphant and the novels of Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell. Young women writers are finding that they have a Scottish tradition behind them as well as imaginative and ideological links to work from elsewhere. Yet at least as striking is the way in which the younger generation of Scottish males is examining not just what ...”

“... from a previous relationship; Kurt, Justine’s foolish, ill-at-ease paramour; and Brett, L’s young and beautiful companion who may, or may not, be his lover. This cast has gathered on an unidentified island where they are awaiting some non-specific global catastrophe from whose effects money and circumstance have rendered them exempt. The book must have ...”

“... events of the night of the murder.Moshfegh’s first full novel, Eileen, is narrated by a morbid young woman living in a terrible small town with her father, a cruel, alcoholic ex-cop. Possible deliverance arrives in the form of a mysterious woman, Rebecca, a crypto-ingénue who seems parachuted in from a 1950s detective movie. Eileen’s musings – she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled innocence lurking in her ...”

“... the midst of all those reformed prostitutes, thoughtful nuns, sailors home from the main, moribund young poets, drowning ladies, eminent critics splashed by turbulent mountain streams, and fugitive Christian missionaries panting from the chase, here was a painting taking as its subject textures, patterns and things, rather than personal histories and ...”

“... outlook and poetry, Basil Greenslade indicates how necessary another kind of opportunism was to a young ‘nobleman with a modest estate and fortune, mainly through marriage and royal bounty’, who had neither influence nor interest and had to live by his wits. Consistent principle, Greenslade implies, was something the ...”

“... in London and Oxbridge mostly, is supposed to be deeply satisfying to the English themselves. Robert Crawford, who pursues the argument on behalf of the Scots, avoids this mistake, detecting in a provincial Englishman like Tony Harrison a fury and resentment not surpassed by any Scot. But this is hardly a novel perception, for Harrison has achieved fame ...”

“... see the Malthus family, part of the middling ranks of 18th-century society, the education of the young Thomas Robert, his friends and the development of his ideas till in 1805 he was an established figure, the author of the famous Essay on Population (by then in the sophisticated form of the later editions), a rector of ...”