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[...] This semi-fictional England, beautifully described in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' and given body in his popular columns, was a rather shabby, stoical, anti-American ideally classless place, devoted to small English pleasures like marmalade and suet pudding and fishing in country ponds, puritan…

[...] an actual revolution, in Russia, with its abuses of power and privilege, necessarily disappointed him, because it contaminated the ideal. Orwell became not so much anti-revolutionary as anti-revolution. He used an ideal revolution to scourge an actual one--which is a negative form of messiani…

[...] And the story ends there, where it has to, at a perfect zero of hope.

[...] The autobiographical atmosphere thickens in the last two hundred pages of the book. You could be utterly ignorant of Lydia Davis's personal circumstances and still be pretty sure, on the evidence of the stories, that her parents have died in the last ten years or so. Several of the later text…

[...] Napoleon, the genius of world history, failed in battle; but the amateur, unheroic blunderers, Nikolai and Pierre, survived into peace, surrounded by women, who do not understand warfare, and by children, who must not. To live, writes the poet Yehuda Amichai, is to build a ship and a harbour …