“... were photos depicting older men having power over younger ones and beating them with chains and so forth, or whether he meant something even more sinister and real’. Not much amazement left there.Purdy’s imagination drifts rather flatly towards the atrocious, and hideous events unfold in an atmosphere of lurid calm. Roy rapes Gareth on Brian’s ...”

“... pie-eyed and with some concern, my brother made his exit. On the drive home, my father gave forth with some extreme editorialising about my brother’s predisposition to trouble. But the old man got a thrill out of it. He and my brother had their problems, not least because they resembled each other in their belligerent behaviour, but they loved each ...”

“... the quotidian duties entailed by being a great power: embassies are run, cables go back and forth, visits, bilateral treaties, aid agreements are negotiated, and pronouncements are made. But the heavy boxing that characterised Reagan’s Middle Eastern policy from its beginning until roughly the midde of 1984 – a period that included the return of the ...”

“... that would be essential to dramatic invention. By contrast with university-educated rivals like Christopher Marlowe and John Marston, or the erudite autodidact Ben Jonson, Shakespeare owed most of his classical knowledge to his education in a provincial grammar school; but, in spite of Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less ...”

“... rare direct comment on dress, but since the novel is a parody the remark is ironic, as defined by Christopher Ricks, in that it is both true and not true to the same extent at the same time. ‘Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone,’ Austen writes. ‘No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.’ In parody the text works ...”

“... Nikki in some fairly literate erotic role-play (known in the community as ERP), chatting back and forth in interactive sex scenes that feel like a choose-your-own Fifty Shades of Grey. Given the nature of AI systems, though, these scenarios are flimsy: most apps seem to be using off-the-shelf language models with a wide-ranging but shallow capacity for ...”

“... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...”

“... breaketh, and, one would think, perisheth; but behold, it receiveth life, it chitteth, it putteth forth a blade, and groweth into a stalk, there also appeareth an ear; it also sweetly blossoms, with a full kernel in the ear: it is the same wheat, yet behold how the form and fashion of that which now ariseth, doth differ from that which then was sown, its ...”

“... animation. But Olamina dies before the starships actually take off. The first is called the Christopher Columbus, in spite of her objections. ‘This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch. But one can’t win every battle. One must know which battles ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... reality is seen in terms of the delusion as a whole.’ This fantasy is remarkably like that set forth in a ‘real’ madman’s book – Denkwürdigkeiten, by Schreber, a former president of the Senate of Dresden, whose paranoia was examined by Freud in an essay of 1911. Canetti suggests, rightly, that Freud has missed the point, and that Schreber’s is ...”

“... fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His bruited ...”

“... is evoked in Book Five: Meanwhile our primitive great sire, to meet His godlike guest, walks forth, without more train Accompanied than with his own complete Perfections, in himself was all his state, More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits On princes, when their rich retínue long Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold Dazzles the crowd, and ...”

“... Jonson’s words, could challenge comparison with ‘all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome/Sent forth’. Yet both seem to have felt ambivalent about their trade. As we can tell from the verses he wrote on the publication of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton could be sympathetic to the grandeur of claims like Jonson’s: with a disdainful ...”

“... who eased himself into verses with the air of someone settling down after dinner and about to hold forth (these lines are from ‘Moon Landing’)? It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure           it would not have occurred to women           to think worth while ‘What’s Become of ...”