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“... American original who came of age in the Fifties, Paley has concentrated on short fiction, and her major work is assembled in a single, not extraordinarily hefty volume. (She began writing as a poet, but her first volume of poetry, Begin Again, wasn’t published until 1993. Her miscellaneous essays, articles, reports and public addresses have just been ...”

“... written records of disciples. From a purely literary point of view, Plato, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were more talented and conscientious than the scribes who compiled Confucius’ wisdom. Even if more people have read the Analects than Plato’s Dialogues or the Gospels, and even if its message has influenced more people than they have, it is inferior to ...”

“... grateful. In 1921, though, Pound’s main concern was Eliot. By freeing Eliot, he would strike a major blow for European culture. To this end, he began firing off belligerent circulars. The line was: put your money where your mouth is. ‘Must restart civilisation: people who say they care, DON’t care unless they care to the extent of £5 in the spring and ...”

“... Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the most recognisable, though I prefer Myrtle Gordon in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is in the twilight of her career and bent on sabotaging the play for which she’s currently rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her ...”

“... omphalos, omphalos.The clarity of this omphaloskeptic vision is, I would suggest, one of the major reasons for Seamus Heaney’s emergence as the most internationally-acclaimed Irish poet since W.B. Yeats. For he has demonstrated once again that there are more ways of making it new than are known to those critics of poetry who simply follow current ...”

“... of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Only slowly over the decades was this exciting approach to reading a major religious text replaced by more academic strategies. (I comprehensively failed all parts of the exam to become any kind of saint.) The context in which one reads the Koran and the expectations one brings to that reading are crucial to one’s understanding ...”

“... could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even ...”

“... brilliant dunce. Even if he did not have the ear of a close reader, he certainly did make and mark major changes to the tenor of English classical scholarship. Editions of classical texts by English scholars in the earlier 17th century were generally poor affairs, by continental standards. Thomas Farnaby, who edited Seneca’s plays, and ...”

“... belief of one kind or other. The last intense decade of war could have been expected to produce a major fictional recognition of the emotional appeal and social import of the ideological mode of thought, but it hasn’t. The TV series Homeland, which depicts a white American soldier as a Muslim convert and terrorist, seems to be alone in hinting, if ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... false belief about pirates and slave-traders. When Britain in 1807, the US in 1808 and the major European powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 banned the transportation of slaves by sea, slaving became assimilated in international law to piracy, a capital offence. In the seaman’s ballad ‘The Flying Cloud’, dating from the 1830s, the narrator ...”

“... drew and painted Bachardy and Isherwood, sitting side by side together in that house), is a major contemporary artist. It is a retrospective of his early drawings (in black and white) and later paintings (in colour) of various movie stars, film directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, costumiers, choreographers, composers, columnists, producers and ...”

“... Iraqis were killed in March. American politicians ran for cover. While I was in Baghdad in March, John McCain visited, at the same time as Dick Cheney. Both expressed confidence that security was improving. McCain told CNN that Muqtada’s ‘influence has been on the wane for a long time’. Two weeks later, he denied he had ever said such a thing; what he ...”

“... in Fallujah are becoming more confident. In one attack in February they almost killed General John Abizaid, the US Middle East commander, and in another they overran the police headquarters, killing some twenty men. The soldiers in the specialised units of the 82nd Airborne Division sound a little perplexed by the sort of war they are fighting. At a base ...”

“... the Lion Woman’, ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’, ‘Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy’ and John Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. But by the turn of the century, the mood of the public had changed and the public display of such ‘human prodigies’ – as they preferred to be called – had become unacceptable in many countries. The profession of ...”