“... middle-aged rock music critic), issued an interesting warning. Talking about the popularity of straight, commercial pop music (‘Sugar, Sugar, Honey, Honey’), and the often dire pretensions of progressive, underground music (‘You’re two Thousand Light Years from Home’), he noticed that the mumsy commercial stuff ‘is crap, but the people are ...”

“... Mitt Romney has now joined Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in the political void that awaits any rejected American presidential nominee who doesn’t care to linger into senatorial senescence. Dole appeared in adverts for Viagra. Dukakis has been a public transport activist. Mondale, in 2002, at the age of 74, ran an 11-day campaign for his old Minnesota Senate seat after Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash ...”

“... thousand words. At that rate, the 290,000 words of ‘beautifully crafted descriptions’ – as Michael Wood put it in his review in the LRB of 3 January – that make up Eça de Queirós’s ‘masterly’ The Maias would have cost Dedalus £23,000 to translate. If it paid for it itself, of course: grants are available to English-language publishers from ...”

“... putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was clearing the decks for the following year’s election and he needed one of his most contentious and least popular ministers to be less visible. Still, he discussed it ...”

“... give his own opinions on poetry and Russian history until he was abruptly cut off. Stalin wanted a straight answer to a straight question, and Pasternak never forgave himself for failing to give it. A more adroit and in a sense a more unscrupulous man would have at once answered, ‘Yes, he is very important indeed,’ and ...”

“... In my dealings with him, however, I never found him the ‘semi-housetrained polecat’ that Michael Foot once called him. Back in 1980-81, when he was a junior minister at the Department of Industry and I was covering the mysteries of the Common Market for the Financial Times, I found him an agreeable character with a wry and self-deprecating sense of ...”

“... a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hope of establishing that there ...”

“... author with a useful facility for writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family ...”

“... Roman army and retook Pontus one final time. Open conflict among Roman commanders again played straight into his hands, but in Rome, Pompey’s supporters were always on the lookout for new ways to augment their patron’s glory. They now seized the opportunity to have the command against Mithridates transferred to Pompey, who might thereby continue a long ...”

“... even slightly implausible, persistence, while acknowledging that their makers have left the straight way: one digs with his pen, the other retires to eat dirt. Or take another un-adopted poem, one or two along in Short Haul Engine, ‘Boyfriend’s Car’. Every word dangerous, every word a specification: Black Nova. Jacked up. Fast. Rhetorical ...”

“... of context’, where the words of a poem represent possibilities of meaning rather than the straight delivery of a preconceived thought. Even so, her writing, attentive to every twist and turn of the words on the page, has a riskiness about it that we don’t associate with the New Criticism. Unless of course we count William Empson as belonging to the ...”

“... walked the talk: he carried momentum, all the momentum of a small country. Before America set him straight, he considered ‘it was better to have the support of a small nation than everything inherent in the idiocy of a huge nation.’ (America got wind of this attitude, got very sniffy and never quite forgave him.) He was a pendulum, and there was no ...”

“... Eurydice, and when Lot’s wife looked back she was turned to salt. Perhaps their looks were too straight. White’s hesitations allow him to celebrate what may have been madness, and to question the celebration at the same time. Forgetting Elena, White’s first novel, which is all about disguise and decorum, a picture of the gay world of Fire Island as if ...”

“... had created the Transport and General Workers Union; and Herbert Morrison, the shop assistant straight out of Mr Polly, had risen to influence through local government in London, including the leadership of the London County Council. The later decline in the authority of trade unionists in Parliament was to have serious consequences, but the virtual ...”

“... that’s his plot. Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot. And then there is Rémy Marathe, the leader of a group of Québecois secessionist, wheelchair-bound terrorists, who spends the first ...”