“... as critical principles.’ But the pressure of literary theory seems particularly regrettable in David Lodge’s essay on Milan Kundera. Much of it is an interesting, useful account of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Lodge thinks it necessary to spend several pages working out his notion that ‘the modernist novel is generally ...”

“... action was nothing new, particularly in time of war, but no power had ever formally espoused such means as an arm of peacetime policy before. Forsaking the traditional intelligence role of attempting to discover what was really happening, the CIA from the outset saw one of its main tasks as making things happen. By 1953 it had already grown to six times its ...”

“... his line should sound. In Modernising Shakespeare’s Spelling Stanley Wells refers the reader to David Abercrombie’s paper ‘A Phonetician’s View of Verse Structure’ (1961), which is reprinted in Abercrombie’s Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics (Oxford, 1965). Wells follows Abercrombie in arguing that ‘the basis of the structure of English ...”

“... and soulful actor. Harriet, sitting at home in a state of ‘profound despondency’, and by no means aware of her part in the genesis of the entertainment, allowed herself to accept tickets for the Grand Concert Dramatique donné par M. Hector Berlioz where the Fantastique (‘Episode de la vie d’un artiste’) was to be followed by the premiere of ...”

“... on moral as well as pragmatic grounds. Mr Kaufman, it is true, comes up with one or two novel means of striking back at privatisation. There are, as he says, certain areas where public bodies like local authorities enjoy considerable expertise which might be turned to profitable enterprises. Their gardeners, for example, could surely enter the ...”

“... in poor countries: ‘What shall cause thee to understand what is the Bank?’ he asked. ‘It means the complete handing over of the reins of government to the enemy of Islam, the enslaving of the people to that enemy, the surrendering of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.’ Al-Afghani may have been ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... don’t lose their passport in the process. Rodgers goes on to address the Marxist arguments of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, which hold that postmodern cultural fragmentation is connected to the shift from the Fordist national economies of the first part of the 20th century to the post-Fordist global economy of the last part. In the Marxist view, the ...”

“... no city should be so large that a man could not walk out of it in a morning. London, while by no means on a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7 a.m., and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening. Following Connolly, what this says ...”

“... as a ‘social democratic project … deep in Tory Buckinghamshire’ and wound up in 1992, which means the period of the town’s life as a state-driven experiment was perfectly bifurcated by the Thatcher election in 1979. Expected to house at least 150,000 transplants from overcrowded London, Milton Keynes’s south-eastern location and late start meant ...”

“... the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of allegory, and an elaborate joke, his conspiracy plot is a way of arranging non-fictional events ...”

“... to Israel’s National Water Carrier. Israel declared that this would be an attack on one of its means of livelihood and would be construed as a threat to peace; the Arab scheme, they claimed, denied Israel’s right to exist. At the Alexandria Summit in September 1964, by which time Israel had already begun test pumpings on the first stage of the National ...”

“... of them – with severe respect. Better than anyone else, they know that a work of art means more than its creator intended it to mean, that artworks live what Montale called ‘the second life of art’ with their readers. But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”