“... was prime minister than when he wasn’t. The reason that Great Britain is usually happier and more relaxed under a Labour than under a Conservative government lies in the British instinct for self-preservation. The rich are more capable of exercising this instinct than the poor. Better-equipped, better-educated, better ...”

“... perestroika, it was even possible to see the point of another ubiquitous slogan: ‘Lenin is more alive than all the living!’ Not any longer. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Lenin cult has been systematically destroyed. Thousands of streets and squares, parks and museums, factories and farms, not to speak of towns and cities, have ...”

“... seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a ...”

“... to have held that office. Now a non-Jesuit historian has monumentalised the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable ...”

“... and pulpitry’; only to end and cancel out his own argument by a series of comminations more sweeping and prejudiced than Leavis at his worst. The damned include, since Grigson is a Little Englander, ‘the mob of Lowlanders who write in Lallans’ (for Hugh Macdiarmid, as for many others, he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ...”

“... our shared sentence: ‘I shall be dead.’ The poet A.E. Stallings faces up to the unknown in a more tender voice in ‘Another Bedtime Story’: The tales that start with once and end with ever after, All, all of the stories are about going to bed, About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread Of laying the body down, of lying under a ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... Doris Lessing is now saying she finds it more of a nuisance than a pleasure to have won the Nobel Prize. Considering the scope of her achievements it seems that a convergence of the twain – Lessing and the prize, the Titanic and the iceberg – was fated, but it is understandable that the impact has been disagreeable; she cannot think celebrity is her business ...”

“... designed to infuriate the ill-read reviewer: Thirlwell appends a list of authors from whom, more or less accurately and overtly, he has quoted in the text. We shall have to return to all of the above formal paraphernalia, and especially to the provenance of this last trick, which points to a taste for the 20th-century avant-garde that all three of ...”

“... a tank shell exploding in Iraq thirty years later. But the faces are what we remember, and the more we encounter, the less we’re able to mark our distance from McCullin’s subjects. They look as if they’re within arm’s reach: if they whispered a greeting or a curse, we would hear it clearly. And as we move around the exhibition, from one room to the ...”

“... firmly fixed on the readers of the magazines he wrote for, in a way that had never bothered the more obsessed and manic genius of Kipling. And so London’s strong men say to their girlfriends, or rather they ‘passionately cry’: ‘Even unto death I shall claim you, and no mortal man shall come between.’ And a handsome fellow he was as he waded among ...”

“... that they would have liked to hear what it was like to carry a standard in battle, or to know more about the Spanish lady to whom he gave a lift under fire, or about the wounded soldier he decided to carry on his ‘private mules’ rather than leave him dying at the roadside with the others: but on these matters Aitchison keeps a tight lip, just as he ...”

“... great exploitation of coal when industry elsewhere was failing to expand. Such families brought more than their labour to Wales: they brought their language, and they, the urbanised Welsh, and the Education Act of 1870, jointly account for the development of a monoglot English-speaking population. This population was a minority, though only just, of the ...”

“... scope and one collection of highly inventive short stories. His first novel, Gob’s Grief, was more varied in style and intent than some entire careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the ...”

“... Germany and Italy. Knausgaard, who’d moved to Sweden in 2002, remarrying and starting a family, more or less sat out the Norwegian national debate about the ethics of his project. (After the outcry occasioned by Book 2, in which he wrote with – it’s said – brutal frankness of his marriages and the emotional strain of pushing a pram around ...”