“... domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history. It may now be the exception in literary and specialist journalism, but at the start of the 19th century it was pretty much the rule – to the extent that France in 1850 legislated to forbid the publication of unsigned articles on philosophical, political and ...”

“... knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was ...”

“... adult life outside the UK (in Poland, Italy, France, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand), which may explain why he has been called a contemporary Graham Greene, an epithet which does him few favours, since his prose has little in common with Greene’s and the moral issues that preoccupy him have nothing to do with Catholicism. His novels include all the ...”

“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

“... onto the floor, picking through the motley treasures between sips from a mug whose tawny contents may have been cold tea without milk. (S)he: I have no idea whether this compromised pronoun represents sensitivity or the opposite, but it seems the best choice of a bad lot. ‘He’ is reductive in one way, ‘she’ in another, and though ‘(s)he’ seems to ...”

“... his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be left out to achieve such a grand synthesis, or so disquieting a compromise.He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... confronted the Paisley phenomenon have not been entirely immune. More ‘scientific’ terminology may be applied – ‘authoritarian’, ‘fascistoid’, ‘reactionary’, ‘populist’ – but the gain in objective understanding is often more apparent than real. A shortage of hard research data from the grass roots of Protestant Loyalism has led ...”

“... is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a hyper-articulate, decorous Queen’s English that deliberately celebrates the sort of cultures where dialect is ...”

“... Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. The scene is laid in darkness outside Madrid, where the city’s captured defenders face a firing-squad. Some already lie dead, boltered with pink gore; meanwhile, the squad ‘a faceless testudo’ takes aim again. The eye is drawn to a man, arms raised, pleading for his life. A point of suspension between life and death, he effectively sabotages the representation ...”

“... out) they are in operation.There are also two romances in play. The first is industrial: these may be the last merchant ships the Clyde ever builds and therefore ‘ane end o’ ane auld sang’ in the phrase used to describe the end of Scottish sovereignty in 1707. The second is Hebridean: the fifty inhabited islands that make their ragged pattern off the ...”

“... War. Hersh wanted the story to speak for itself. He finally gave it to the independent journalist David Obst’s Dispatch News Service. Thirty-six newspapers picked up the story, but the New York Times wasn’t among them; Time, Newsweek and the television networks ignored it. Self-censorship was pervasive. The Washington Post was an exception: the Post’s ...”

“... power of the raped and dying woman’. So the work is not as tightly composed as Donaldson may wish it to be – although this is not the defect he may fear it is. The parts of the book are unequal, since Lucretia has all the thunder (St ...”

“... I “know” that I have lost something irrecoverable.’ This is an outrageous story: but one may admire it for that, for its mischievous invention, and for its limited awareness of such gestures and proportions as a baby might truly have observed. It brings to mind what Roth said about his revered Heine: ‘Maybe he did make up the odd fact, but then he ...”

“... supposed ‘goals’ of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946-56, the realisation of which may be seen in A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, these and other historians wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn ...”