“... and salute as an old Saussurean friend, the ‘play of difference’. Segalen himself, be it said, was an excitable rather than a measured thinker, far more a poet in his own eyes than a philosopher, and, for all the suggestive ways in which he anticipates modes of thought that took off only long after his death, not to be filed away merely as a sort of ...”

“... is levied at this point, leave without ever penetrating beyond the choir, to the shrine of St Edward behind the High Altar and the royal tombs which surround it. Yet this was the heart of medieval Westminster, and the reason for the existence of the present building. Those who skip it miss more than holy bones. Within the shrine space, near the tomb of St ...”

“... civilisations’. When polemicising against Wittgensteinians or, later, Geertzians, Gellner often said that human beings were not merely ‘concept-fodder’ – that is, that there were determinants of action other than language and culture – but perhaps his own intellectual practices tended to treat the more thickly textured work of colleagues in ...”

“... and size, Amazonian bush dogs, were all around us in great profusion, just as Pedro Sarmiento had said in La Paz. But Pedro, back in the capital after five years in the Beni, had also said that we would never make it to Trinidad. ‘An inferno!’ was how they cursed the endless track through the lowlands, though it was not ...”

“... same is true of any history that aspires to explain the place of Muslims and Islam in Europe, as Edward Said pointed out, or of Christians and Christianity, or Jews and Judaism, in Islam. In this sense, and despite Schama’s exquisite awareness of the media sensibilities of our age, Belonging feels out of date. Reading it I was reminded of the ...”

“... way and that, observed it with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific, and said when she was finished: “How ugly it is, even uglier than a woman’s thing.”’) It is not hard to imagine the surprise of Florence, the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice ...”

“... SNP-led government, wrote a few months ago in a blog for the Telegraph of a Treasury aide who’d said to him that ‘Alex Salmond wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the ...”

“... grandfather had married into the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the service of Edward IV. Charles’s father was William Brandon, who according to the Paston letters got himself a bad reputation, ‘for that he should have by force ravished and swived an ancient gentlewoman, and yet was not therewith eased, but swived her oldest ...”

“... money to launch his political career: five billion yen (US$45 million) to be exact – or so it is said. One can already see why Kan’s party might not be quite as ‘citizen-centred’ as he says it will be. Nothing suggests that there will be a sudden improvement in the prospects for a more representative democracy. Hashimoto’s remnant of the LDP last ...”

“... and readies herself for the first bite. Where are we? If the taxi outside is anything to go by, Edward Burra’s The Snack Bar, an oil painting from 1930 in the Tate (but rarely shown), is set in Paris or Toulon or, plausibly, in a Frenchified Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John ...”

“... takes a back seat as he becomes fascinated with the family on whose property he is living. Edward Lawless is a wreck of a man, clumsy, inarticulate, frequently drunk; his wife Charlotte is noble, suffering, strangely withdrawn; Ottilie, Charlotte’s niece, is blonde, somewhat graceless, but physically available. Even in the physical abandon of his ...”

“... and ragged trousers. He did not volunteer an explanation, and I did not ask. But nothing more was said about him coming with us from San Ignacio to Trinidad, his own destination. When Oscar left in search of cold beer, I returned to the garden, a more attractive prospect than my room with its suspect bedding. Our hostess, one of Bolivia’s minority of pure ...”

“... The publishers say that The Poetry of Edward Thomas is the first full-length study to deal exclusively with Thomas’s poetry (in Britain, they must mean). On the face of it, a six-decade gap of this sort shows a strange failure in critical husbandry. Yet it is not really so surprising. In the first place, who would the readers have been? Who are they now? Edward Thomas is a poet with the kind of accessibility that one does not expect to be increased by prolonged exposition: on the contrary perhaps ...”

“... He was passionate, and uncompromising, about Wapping: He stuck a gun in their buck. Sign here, he said, or it’s the bullet. You aren’t worth negotiation, and I’m in a hurry ... Some readers, I know, will say that those who write for the Sun and the News of the World have no self-respect to lose. All the same there is a stink of loss at Wapping. He ...”

“... lives, in idyllic La Jolla just north of San Diego. Marlowe remained in LA. The author who once said he ‘lived on the edge of nothing’ gave that existence to his protagonist, in whom were combined the drinker of Chandler’s successful, social Twenties and the itinerant, lonely, anonymous man of the Depression decade; eliminating Cissy from Marlowe’s ...”