“... but Edmund weeps, and why he weeps is the riddle that the reader must solve. For Mr Burns does not grant us the obtuse privilege of supposing that his book is simply about two oddly-assorted chaps who set off to shoot a panda and have adventures by the way. Its underlying purport is hinted at in diverse asides. ‘There were so many layers to my identity ...”

“... The spirit is sometimes called Structuralism, sometimes Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism. James Gribble’s book is a call to action: the teaching of literature, he argues, should be based upon the centrality of literary criticism. Literary criticism is ‘that form of discourse which undertakes the analysis of works of literature so as to do justice ...”

“... run, but much of its money came from the government. Shortly before his death, Ulysses S. Grant was made its president, and his name helped. The army paid for NRA shooting matches, and allowed it to buy surplus military rifles at cost. After an outbreak of train robberies, the NRA was put in charge of running shooting courses for railroad mail ...”

“... of Webb’s houses – he was largely a domestic architect – were built for men like Morris and James Beale, the owner of Standen, who got their money from industry, business and the professions and had no roots in the land, however vocal their attachment to it. At the start of Webb’s career there was still hope for a revival of farming and country ...”

“... metallic brocades with which their heraldic costumes were decorated. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand ...”

“... his material.Produced under Fascism in 1943, Visconti’s Ossessione (an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s hardboiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice) is generally considered the first Neorealist film, but it was Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the first movie made after the war to represent the recent Italian past, that planted the ...”

“... an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ... diamond ...”

“... should at least be intended. Allowing for a slightly surprising tendency on the part of Amis to grant interviews of uncharacteristic solemnity, one can only suppose he was not quite straight-faced in giving himself lines that would suit only his dimmer or more ridiculous characters. ‘For most young people,’ Amis recalls, ‘the summer of 1940 was ...”

“... side lamp, and gave it a passing thought. All she could think about Mount Rushmore was that Cary Grant and whatwashername – Eva Marie Saint had crawled all over it trying to get away from ... James Mason, she thought, in North by Northwest. They had clambered across the faces of American presidents carved into the ...”

“... lawfully do in the exercise of the royal prerogative – declare war, make peace, sign treaties, grant honours, govern colonies – and what requires the authority either of the common law or of Parliament. Over these centuries it has been the rolling back of ministerial claims to arbitrary power, exercised by the use of the royal prerogative, that has ...”

“... faith that this same coercive apparatus could be wrangled into the service of women? Even if we grant, with Dworkin and other radical feminists, that sex work cannot be understood outside the frame of gendered hierarchy, what does it mean to ignore sex workers’ near-universal insistence that the criminalisation of their trade makes their lives less ...”

“... of fate. In Britain, ‘The Tragic Mistake’ seems to have begun its life in the troubled days of James I and is often appended to accounts of the capture and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh after his return from the Orinoco in 1618. More than three hundred years later in Germany, a related tale was told about a soldier returning home in the desperate days ...”

“... market have been to restrict supply and raise prices: the first when it cut, by two thirds, the grant given to housing associations to build new homes, and the second with its mocking parody of Right to Buy, ‘Help to Buy’, offering already well-off people cheap loans to overbid for overpriced houses they couldn’t otherwise afford.Those who believe the ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... services. MI6 probably regarded me as a relatively tame grammar-school oik. (I went to a Direct Grant school. It had pretensions to public-school status, and boarders, but we all knew it didn’t make the grade socially.) The interview was curious, conducted in a crumbling corner of Carlton House Terrace by the spitting image of Rosa Kleb in From Russia ...”