“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... Siffredi opposite Caroline Ducey, in only her fourth role. Siffredi is painfully vulnerable, his self-consciousness softening his He-Man looks and bearing. As the lover of Ducey’s Marie, a schoolteacher whose neurasthenic boyfriend no longer wants to sleep with her, Siffredi is a broken toyboy. His body seems cut and pasted into the film from another ...”

“... meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he frequented, where she would be told to wait in the ...”

“... dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. Nothing of this self-doubting despondency about his poetic creations is to be found in the millions of words Traubel credits to Whitman in his final years. Rather, he is intent by then only on monumentalising himself, as the conversations turn, time and again, to his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E. Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. D.B. Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated ...”