“... 20-year-old maid inaugurated a similar union, the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers. Jessie Stephen told the assembled crowd of mistresses and maids that she was ‘out to preach the divine doctrine of discontent’. Soon blacklisted by employers – one of the dangers of unionisation – she made her way to London and joined forces with Oliver. The ...”

“... writer of little leaves’), normally appears in his own work as a wide-eyed naive, the easiest of marks to a swarm of fraudulent predators: so it is no surprise to be told in this first biography that he was really a crotchety manic-depressive, bilious, miserly, insecure, inadequate as a husband and a father, cold, unfaithful, vindictive and terminally ...”

“... than judgment and on show than study, Sloane’s collection, it seems, will not receive high marks. Attention to the problem of collecting has been high on the scholarly agenda in recent years. A Journal of the History of Collections has been founded, and a ‘new museology’ has sought to interpret the construction and meaning of such ...”

“... been achieved in the last thousand years of human history that is not offensive to BT, Manpower, Marks & Spencer, Sky, Tesco, McDonald’s and anybody else prepared to chip in the odd £12 million). It’s still not too late to buy your own zone. The Mobility Zone will, it appears, be funded by Ford (‘product category exclusivity’), whose factory on the ...”

“... is grasped for its incremental and associational significance. It is a place of synecdoche, in Stephen Bann’s sense, where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts and where value is distinctly not of the tradeable kind. If the continuities of ancestral residence were to be broken, then the associational magic would die. If an object were to ...”

“... Kiplings, the Messrs Cadbury and McVitie, the Jack Daniels, the Sainsburys, the Guinnesses, the Marks and the Spencers, and of course dear old Mister Gordon and his fine distillery. These many named and unnamed of the acknowledgment pages are the foundations on which a book is built: they help to determine its size and shape, its character and its ...”

“... some 220,000 words, or about six times that number of characters: letters, spaces and punctuation marks.’ The changes they describe, and the ones I could find in a preliminary comparison with the old text, are quite small; but the patience and the care (and the good sense) with which they are arrived at are exemplary, and 9000 instances of anything will ...”

“... the logic of the central issues and arguments’ in a mannerly prose which clearly marks him as an outsider. His book is worthy of the serious response it asks for, but all he really expects is the rejoinder that logical analysis is inappropriate; Deconstruction is not a theory but a ‘project’, and has a different ‘logic’. Ellis wants ...”

“... was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob. Stephen Greenblatt, living proof that one may share Eagleton’s scepticism towards the institutions of established power but still relish the nuances of literary texts as Bayley does, would doubtless see the election as yet another example of how authority ...”

“... which did nothing but perpetuate and deepen the conflict. The other two services get much higher marks for the part they played in the war to crush Palestinian resistance. ‘The Shin Bet and the Mossad,’ the authors conclude, ‘could ... be justly proud of their achievements in making the status quo tenable – for their own countrymen at least.’ But ...”

“... world of a catalogue. Watching the Victorian scene of the pageant in Between the Acts, Mrs Jones marks the present moment by the thought that her daughter ‘has a refrigerator’. And the Times, in that novel, predicts an ‘after-the-war’ future: ‘Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the crannied wall. Each of us a free man; plates ...”

“... performance than Lohan, whose tardiness and wayward lurches were chronicled in an on-set report by Stephen Rodrick for the New York Times magazine titled ‘Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.’ The article was such a crunchy read, so stuffed with only-in-Hollywood anecdotes and luxury shopping specifics, that it upstaged the movie ...”

“... confess to an ill-defined unease about their topic – it’s trivial, it’s embarrassing, it marks a woman as too irreducibly her body, as just too female – suggests that Houppert is on to something when she says that menstruation is the last taboo. In taking on the subject, Houppert violates the central tenet of what she calls ‘menstrual ...”

“... of chocolate,’ she said eventually. ‘A bar someone took a bite out of. Your ribs are the teeth marks.’ The deformity, which has been passed down to Lito from his father and grandfather, horrifies Rosa’s mother, who exiles her to the house of a wealthy relative in Manila, thus indirectly opening up for her a life as a middle-class doctor rather than as ...”

“... Cohn-Bendit to Dachau!’ while the cars hooted the old Algérie française rhythm. Caute quotes Stephen Spender’s description of this scene: ‘the triumphant bacchanal of the Social World of Conspicuous Consumption, shameless, crowing and more vulgar than any crowd I had seen on Broadway or in Chicago’. If Tariq Ali represents ‘the optimism of the ...”