“... in the West Indies.’ The African revival, as he sees it, may provide a ‘startling access of self-respect’, but can’t help West Indians to root themselves more firmly in the Caribbean. For Walcott, then, the first step towards creating a West Indian identity is to resist the meanings conferred by history or mythology since the histories and myths in ...”

“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”

“... what Archer would doubtless call the greatest of all prizes. It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record briefings, the supplanting of Brownite X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous ...”

“... LaRouche, the real ‘existentialist’ honchos on the boardwalk aren’t Adorno or Arendt, but Robert McNamara and the Kilgorean figure of William Westmoreland. This volume bears little sign of the bourgeois deviationism to which Marcuse fell prey in the Forties, though it may be coming in one of the promised sequels. These were, after all, the years when ...”

“... Such a suggestion is of necessity pure speculation, and indeed it may well be wrong, but it is not self-evidently absurd. Nor does Richard Cromwell, as he appears in this book, look as convincing an architect of his own downfall as the ‘Tumble-down Dick’ on whom we were brought up. He fought back vigorously against his opponents, and, like Charles in ...”

“... Land art, Performance art, Living sculpture, Body art and Community art. Kramer is unimpressed by Robert Smithson’s ‘ambition ... to break with the conventions of studio production and museum exhibitions in order to create an art that would stand in a more intimate and vital relationship to the world of nature and to the man-made social ...”

“... been just as effective. Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a ...”

“... version of Henryson. There is a strangeness about some of these poems that recalls the self-consciousness of Hogg’s best fiction; for example when he interrupts himself, as he does in two different poems, to discuss the meaning and success of his own extended similes, or where his medieval dialect suddenly acknowledges its fakery by referring to ...”

“... armed clashes, allowing uniformed and armed Albanians to set up checkpoints. Once the US envoy Robert Gelbard had issued a statement that me KLA could be treated as a terrorist organisation, Milosevic had die perfect excuse for a crackdown: in March, he moved into Drenica with tanks and heavy artillery against unarmed civilians. After Drenica everything ...”

“... it, the communist leadership had abandoned the Partisan practice he most cherished – relentless self-criticism – and consecrated instead a social hierarchy that could be justified only in wartime. Although he came to see himself as Trotsky’s heir, Djilas wasn’t prepared to form a political faction to demand more democratisation of the state: his ...”

“... entirety. Most OuLiPian texts astonish not by their powers of expansion, however, but by their self-imposed laws of constraint. The best known of these are Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic La Disparition (1969), composed without once using the letter e, and his Les Revenentes (1972), which contains no vowels except e. Over the years OuLiPians have developed ...”

“... in any general, xenophobic way, it has accelerated the slow resurgence of English national self-awareness. Was that effect intended by the new Tory leadership? It’s hard to know. In the short term, there are Tory votes to be gained in the South by calling for a ban on Scottish MPs voting on English matters. But in the longer term, the prizes the ...”

“... the executive and legislative – from the judicial branch.This conception of judging as a self-denying, uncreative, non-political enterprise is constantly reiterated by the justices themselves. ‘Courts have a vital responsibility to enforce the rule of law, which is critical to a free society,’ Barrett said at her confirmation hearing. ‘But ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... in classics. If we are going to have endless retranslations of the same old texts – which is not self-evidently a good thing – we might hope that at least some of them would be done by classicists who are younger, or less white, or less male.Of course, it is quite easy for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired old ...”