“... involves the contrast between the work published in her lifetime – which seems so aware, as David Kalstone put it, ‘of the smallness and dignity of human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in ...”

“... his book about censorship: not just dishonour but the question whether the term still means anything. It’s important too to see that in spite of the high moral tone of many speakers in these works, Coetzee is staging an argument, not trying to win one or even, finally, to assert one. He uses fiction to think with, and in Elizabeth Costello the ...”

“... wars in less than six decades and still does not have peace agreements with all of its neighbours means that people live with the feeling of constant threat. This feeling, justified or not, has made Israeli decision-makers very cautious in negotiation and loath to change the political status quo, whence, as Weizman shows, the need to reach agreements granting ...”

“... to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the second half of the 20th century. Hughes valued him as a friend and a fine analyst; he was also the best exhibition installer of his time. But he was a very slow writer with ‘an indurated ...”

“... commemorating the Baader-Meinhof Group (‘The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me’). And the paintings were executed in 1988, after Richter had read The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust, a book that did much to discredit the theory that Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and other members of the Red Army Faction ...”

“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month Barack Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaida, IS was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul. Wary of making the same ...”

“... they are still very much of the common people. Stagecoach was the director’s own project. David Selznick wouldn’t take it on as producer because he saw it as ‘just another Western’ with no big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and ...”

“... the impossible, an enigma forever eluding our grasp, one who communicates by hitherto unknown means: Is there an unwritable unknown poem that exceeds anything the technique of writing can do? We will never know. Maybe this is her triumph. She has taken her secret to the grave and will not give up the ghost. To arrive as if by telepathic electricity and ...”

“... but that she wasn’t influential enough. Her marginalisation in the course of the Cold War means she has no successor today: there is no one able to use anthropology as the basis for mass appeals to the public. The post-Vietnam generation never forgave Mead for co-operating with the government; it refused to recognise that she was trying to change ...”

“... trying to tell us what he thinks of us, to show his scorn for humanity, and he uses elephants as a means of expression, that’s all.’ Or perhaps elephants are ‘a mere political diversion’, a front for stirring up troubles like Britain’s in Kenya and France’s in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of ...”

“... a crime, a jewellery heist, he has just read about in the newspaper. He doesn’t know what this means, but thinks he should tell the police.He doesn’t make it to the police station, and the scene of his death is a much cited moment in film history; Lang himself copied it in his late work The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). The man’s car stops at a ...”

“... teaching Marlowe and Austen in the day job and then also having a role in radical politics: it means treating one’s teaching and writing about Marlowe and Austen as a form of radical politics in itself. Guillory is severe on this particular form of professional self-delusion.These various forms of exaggeration are, fundamentally, expressions of a lack of ...”

“... gifted and respectable unfortunate with his endowment of strong and fine feelings, and the by no means apocryphal coiner, connoisseur and acter-out of lines like ‘Syne coup her o’er amang the creels.’ There are poems in which the opposing conducts are in some sense reconciled, and the epistolary mode may be thought to have encouraged a convergence: but ...”

“... known as Agenda 2010, that was introduced between 2003 and 2005. Its most notorious element is the means-tested basic welfare system known as Hartz IV, which four million German households rely on. The party that masterminded the changes and forced them through against popular protest was the SPD. Fifteen years later it is still struggling to come to terms ...”