“... collective traditions while legitimating competitive struggle. The major party Conventions mark the midway stage of the election. And so, while sounding full of fight and confident of victory, the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election rhetoric: the loser’s ...”

“... unsettlingly radical to read Discipline and Punish or bits of the Ecrits, it was no longer a mark of the blackest reaction to allow that Foucault was impressionistic with facts or that Lacan manifested cult-leaderish tendencies. The academic careers to be built on theory had largely been built; the hardest-core young Derridean among our teachers later ...”

“... faintly has it entered our history, provoked our armies, disturbed our empire and commonwealth. ‘Ford Cortina,’ said the late Poet Laureate, rather sniffily: ‘it sounds like a South American.’ We can’t easily imagine what it’s like to be one: their fiction is obscured by the charms of Magical Realism. Their political spasms trouble us less than ...”

“... 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives’. And yet in the interim a feeling had arisen that the imaginary worlds ...”

“... in context, though the effect being aimed at is indicated when Jerry is shown reading Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The Little Drummer Girl (1983) features an Israeli operative called Kurtz whose actions are similarly shrouded in uncertainty: ‘At what stage in the chase he had hit upon his plan,’ we’re ...”

“... the same critic he had been in the 1950s; that theory, narratology and theology had all left their mark on his work, and that indeed he had been expending much effort in acting as a kind of mild English hotelier for the accommodation of warring families. He made one feel almost patriotic, for he was one of the few British literary critics of his generation ...”

“... while Cyril Béghin compares a shot in Avatar to Tintoretto’s The Finding of the Body of St Mark. The most famous of Cahiers’ early statements – and the one that most directly affected film history – was Truffaut’s 1954 article ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’. The tendency he had in mind resulted from French cinema’s traditional ...”

“... is a notable difference between Hollywood and Forty-Second Street, however, Hollywood, like Henry Ford, conquered the world by mass production: in this instance, of dreams. Its fundamental concern was with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as measured by box-office returns. The musical analogue of Hollywood has, of course, been profoundly imbued ...”

“... been English, but those other mothers, the native nurses and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking Ladino, the ‘largely medieval Spanish of the Sephardim’. Bulgarian was the language used by the family ...”

“... anything as fantastical as reanimation.Coffins may not confer immortality, but for Seuss they do mark a place to dig, a hinged form to swing open. Sonnets are hinged too. If one defining feature of the sonnet is its brevity, another is the dramatic turn that often occurs within its fourteen lines – in the Italian tradition, the volta that marks a ...”

“... platform of Lady Astor? These are questions around which the book circles continually. It is a mark of Steedman’s uncertainty about the stature of her central figure that the answers she gives vary considerably in their emphases. Affirming McMillan’s now unfashionable insistence that ‘our common and material life might be made better,’ she writes ...”

“... 1976 had taken place in the shadow of Watergate, presided over by an unelected president, Gerald Ford, brought in first to replace a besmirched vice president, Spiro Agnew, and then a disgraced President Nixon. Commentators discussed whether democracy was compatible with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book ...”

“... 1938 if it refused to recommend Winston Churchill for election: such a decision, he said, would ‘mark the triumph of a tendency towards minute specialisation ... which I have long watched with concern, as likely to rob the Academy of its national character’. There is also a party-political reason for the intellectual’s retreat: the dispersal of the ...”

“... the divine Jade from the very brink of nuptiality while her husband-to-have-been, the gutless Lord Mark Rand, gnashes his titled English gums helplessly. Given his class and country, the chances of Lord Mark not being scheming, weak, pale and under-equipped are nil. Lucky, Married Men, Sinners, Chances, The Bitch: Jackie ...”

“... so faithful a film fan. Nixon occupied the White House for 67 months. Over that time, according to Mark Feeney’s Nixon at the Movies, he saw 528 movies – an average of nearly two a week. The rate stepped up once Watergate began to darken his presidency in 1973. Chisum was a quintessential Nixon entertainment. The Western was the president’s preferred ...”