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“... is or where she is,’ the man said. ‘What have you been able to do?’ ‘We can do nothing but hope,’ he said. ‘We have prayed,’ the woman said, ‘all the time we have prayed.’ ‘Good,’ I said absently. I was looking round the room. It was gloomy but for the fire and an oil lamp in the alcove on the rear wall. Hams, cured by smoke, hung from ...”

“... the old flapper was attired as for the office, clearly knowing when he was licked. You couldn’t hope to out-dress old Frankie-Frank Spellman, one of the great bitch drag queens of this or any other age. Nobody should grudge the frumpish Hoover a fling or two, or indeed a flounce, though probably with his figure and complexion the stockings were a ...”

“... Even Louis Blanc refused to support them, though he did try to persuade them to stand down in the hope of avoiding further bloodshed. The lack of a clear doctrine or principle, beyond the forlorn cry ‘Liberty or Death!’, had an unsettling effect, even on hostile observers. Why had they done it when the odds were so perilously stacked against them? And why ...”

“... are not a relishing of sadness. ‘Actually, I like to think of myself as quite funny, and I hope this comes through in my writing. But it’s unhappiness that provokes a poem.’ The achieved authority of sadness is not the same as the inaugurating provocation of unhappiness. Larkin would be suspicious of Tennyson’s open arms:Immeasurable sadness!And ...”

“... the Bauhaus had come under threat from the Nazis, who saw it as degenerate and subversive. In the hope of saving it, Mies moved the school to an old telephone factory in Berlin. But in 1933, when the Nazis suspected its printing presses were being used to produce anti-fascist propaganda, soldiers forcibly closed it down. The Gestapo told Mies he could reopen ...”

“... that’s because, Jardine says, ‘there is no end to where cats might not pop up.’ Jardine’s hope is that the book will, ‘in some measure, fill the gap of Muriel’s unwritten memoirs’, meaning the book Spark meant to write as a follow-up to Curriculum Vitae (1992), a scrupulously impersonal autobiography which took the story up to 1957. Finishing ...”

“... withstood every attack alone and friendless, yet he survives. His fans around the world can only hope to endure life’s challenges with a small part of that endurance and determination. Godzilla ...”

“... of us, along with the vogue for books recalling survey courses in comparative literature, which I hope to exploit by promoting, as though it were a novel, this series of elaborately coded personal letters. There are frequent digressions on Zink’s favourite reading material. Her version of the anxiety of influence, she says, is a ‘fear of failure to make ...”

“... deepening regional interest – on both sides of the border – in the Franco-Prussian War. That hope has yet to be ...”

“... approach of Guy de Mallac and others, worthy as their pioneering studies have been. But Christopher Barnes’s ‘Literary Biography’, of which this solid work is the first of two volumes, will certainly become the standard and indispensable guide for students not only of the poet but of his age and literary milieu. The popular Western image of ...”

“... encouraged by his family. His brother has written about him. His diaries have been published. Mr Christopher Sykes has produced an ultimately unsatisfactory but absorbing biography, Mr Don Gallagher has edited an anthology of his journalism, full of biographical clues. For fanatics, a regular Waugh newsletter is published in the United States, dealing with ...”

“... even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hope of establishing that there are real forces at war. The attempt to make MacNeice a precursor seems to have begun in 1974 in Time was away: The World of Louis MacNeice, edited by Terence Brown and Alec Reid, but at that stage it was a tentative ...”

“... Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or lubricity. That he greatly enjoyed researching, writing and defending his thesis is ...”

“... Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers ...”

“... in 1938: however, the British Library strangely did not acquire a copy (nothing fishy here, I hope?). Coal-holes, obscurity: I can’t seem to find much clue to his psyche here, beyond a familiarity with the shadows. Let us forget crime, then. It remains true that no one has been quite straight with us, neither Pennington, nor his old and his new ...”