“... Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage’, its 17,000 words were generated by the celebrated youngish American novelist, journalist and story-writer David Foster Wallace. Although willing to tilt at shiny targets of grammatical contention (the ending of sentences with prepositions etc), Wallace ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations. The Bank of England takes emergency action to stave off financial panic following the ‘mini-budget’. David Bowie implores ...”

“... that shrank and withered. Tuberculosis of the stomach, of the bone marrow. A cancer meant to be slow-moving, to manifest benignly in elderly men from the Mediterranean, which burrowed from the outside in: from marks on the skin, to the stomach and lungs. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever ...”

“... And why are there pigs? ‘Nature loves beauty and delights in diversity: that is well shown by the tail of the peacock, for there nature makes it evident that the bird is born for the sake of the tail and not vice versa.’ ‘Pigs are born to be slaughtered, and god has added a soul to their flesh as a sort of ...”

“... fads and the highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too ...”

“... seeme nothing … where before [a soldier] ever entered into the wars, he thought he could never be so cruell, as to dash the childrens braines against the stones … but afterwards when he was injured with warre, he did it.’ The civil wars of 1642-51 saw the greatest concentration of organised violence in the recorded history of the British ...”

“... We​ had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the poet’s birthplace. Oppen (b. 1908) had recently broken a long silence and become a poet of his time – the 1960s and 1970s – however much he may have insisted, as he did in the same poem, that he was ‘of the Thirties ...”

“... the American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik wrote in the Financial Times that Brexit should be seen as a kabuki drama – ‘stylised but meaningless posturing’. Four years on, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Even if the UK does manage to strike a deal with the EU, relations between the two ...”

“... it comes from the perception that England’s nationalism is crude, unreflective and cartoonish by comparison with the arguments put forward for Scottish independence. Even those of us who are instinctively anti-nationalist – wary of nationalist rhetoric, and the dangers it might bring – recognise that Scottish nationalism is much more sophisticated ...”

“... with a mission ... he was not quite clear in his mind about his mission, but always felt he must be up and doing.’ There are things to fill a day. While Gopu and his family still lived in Kabir Street Nag would take his nephew Tim to school. He has a daily appointment at Coomar’s Boeing Sari Centre, where he is an unpaid book-keeper. Coomar began his ...”

“... you please.’ In a 1936 review, Clifford Fadiman recommended that the prose of William Faulkner be taken with just such a hefty pinch of salt. Fatigued by ‘the Non-Stop or Life Sentence’ which he considered to be the ruin of Absalom, Absalom!, he declared that ‘all of Mr ...”

“... Larkin); and therefore that the best will proclaim its politics with pride. (The manoeuvre will be familiar to readers of contemporary literary theory.) This is clearly an inadequate conception of both literature and politics, because there can be no pristine state which poetry inhabits before it is sullied ...”

“... new novel say it has curdled: ‘so let’s say he does know all Walton’s percussion parts by heart, and has the Hebrew or the Russian word for almost anything, is he able to use them to tell a better story?’ I think he is. In Any Old Iron facts and characters stick together well enough for larger themes to develop through them. Burgess’s densely ...”

“... settlement – he emerged in 1987, under the strains of a war against Iran which he appeared to be losing, as a charter member of what the Jordanians were describing as ‘the great moderate centre’. The other members of this new alignment were Egypt, Jordan and the PLO; it was part of the shift in policy towards Israel which the Palestine National ...”