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“... Samurai (1990), and doesn’t bear much resemblance to Anglophone theory-novels along the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of ...”

“... it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely destination); and the temporary metal fence surrounding it was more of an eyesore than a protection. Soane designed the monument in 1816, originally as a memorial to his ...”

“... where surf breaks like a plasterer ‘smoothing fresh cenotaphs’ and Sandpipers burst like white notes from a ceremonial band. Walcott has hot news from the Caribbean: ‘unrest’, ‘governments falling’, ‘junta and coup d’état, the newest Latino mood’. But he doesn’t find the changes heart-warming. The theme of ‘The Spoiler’s ...”

“... kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.’Hannay is sceptical about the ‘Jew-anarchists’ but notes that his neighbour’s tales of international financiers stirring up chaos for ...”

“... books. Is Satan good or bad? Why exactly did Iago hatch his plot, or Isabel Archer decide to marry Gilbert Osmond? Such speculations need the exercise of just as much intelligence as does the higher jargon, and for most people they are more fun to make. Dr Spacks ends her preface with the comment that although the ambiguities and perplexities associated with ...”

“... 19th-century section, from Hood and Praed and Calverley through Lear and Carroll and then W. S. Gilbert on to Belloc and Chesterton. Indeed, almost all of the book’s second half is shandy, exceedingly good of its kind – but that kind is essentially different from the real thing in the first half. And the mixing of the two causes restlessness in the ...”

“... for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with ...”

“... smart, soothing, sublimely pretty wallpaper muzak for an Alpine sanatorium, redolent of clean white walls, dandelion salad, mineral water, quiet cerebral games of chess – plenty of luxe and calme, but not much volupté. I don’t get the obsessive fandom Kraftwerk generate, which seems only to increase by the year. The mass freak-out among people I knew ...”

“... devastating analysis of the placing of Frith’s Derby Day between Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd and Gilbert and George’s Red Morning Troubles, is a famously provocative writer who sometimes seems to go on the attack just for the hell of it. But I have not talked to a single soul about this hang who is less violently opposed to it then ...”

“... in a child’s alphabet book, even a dominatrix of pornographic fantasy. As Munich reads them, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are haunted by her presence, and so too is Rider Haggard’s She, whose deathless queen has a familiar habit of sleeping in close proximity to the mortal remains of her consort. Even biological barriers prove no impediment to the ...”

“... dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ‘caused it to be artificially spotted and produced it to the public as a camelopard’. (The fraud was discovered by some ‘scientific ...”

“... of Spark’s awareness, converting his own similarly hallucinatory experience into The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Any sudden access of words – Mrs Hawkins’s ‘pisseur de copie’ in A Far Cry from Kensington, the servants’ hypercivilised jabber at the end of Not to Disturb, frugal Lise’s last, terrible brief linguistic extravagance (‘“Kill ...”

“... crit. ‘The Return of the Little Black Dress’ is one chapter title, another, ‘The Women in White’, yet another, ‘Scarlet Women’ (and yes, it seems, they really do eat men like air). Emily Dickinson’s white dress is noted (though not Gilbert and Gubar’s eerie aside about ...”

“... of culture to enforce gender roles and circumscribe her freedom. In a now classic letter to Susan Gilbert, the close friend who was to marry her brother, Austin, Dickinson expresses her critical vision of the institution of marriage, that empire of subordinate softness which she dedicated her life to refusing: I have always hoped to know if you had no dear ...”

“... cack-handed husband. It has literary pretensions – epigraphs courtesy of Voltaire, W.S. Gilbert and Pirandello – and there are suggestions of a darker, more astringent fable shadowing the good old-fashioned satire of suburban life. When he reveals himself, the real psychopath turns out to have madder and nastier ideas about poison than ...”