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“... has happened,’ Ní Chuilleanáin wonders in ‘Witness’, to which the immediate answer might be that no one has in fact asked.Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrative poems are tales of ‘life with the lid on’, to echo Elizabeth Bowen. Her protagonists are typically nameless: a woman on her way to join a convent, a swineherd, a group of traveller women cooking ...”

“... Tatar leaders were quick to plead allegiance to Russia: ‘We Muslims, from young to old, must be sincerely devoted to the tsar and the fatherland and not hesitate to give life, or blood, if it were demanded from us for their protection,’ the tsar’s Crimean mufti declared. Not all Tatars obeyed: some saw the war as an opportunity for liberation from ...”

“... relief maps, reptile skin, leaves. These big black fields command attention and respect simply by virtue of their grand materiality – Serra thinks that blackness is ‘a property, not a quality’. That insistent materiality encompasses not only surface, but also shape and scale and position. Serra knows that a triangle has less ‘weight’, less ...”

“... But the BBC, influential and plural, is perhaps the most representative. A corporation financed by the only tax the government raises but can’t spend, a large-scale employer with a public service remit, a reporter and creator of fashion and culture, a purveyor of news, information, education and entertainment operating at the cutting edge of technological ...”

“... year’s election and he needed one of his most contentious and least popular ministers to be less visible. Still, he discussed it with Gove beforehand – selling it as an opportunity to put ‘all that passion and antagonism’ to better use – and he thought he had his friend’s agreement. Then, out of the blue, ‘Michael emailed to say he had ...”

“... flavour of the wars as combatants and non-combatants experienced them. He follows current fashion by treating the fighting in England, Ireland and Scotland as part of a single struggle, and shows that in all three kingdoms the wars were fought with a mixture of amateurishness and brutality that makes it absurd to romanticise them. Some officers on both sides ...”

“... Novels dealing with childhood memory are frequently said to be ‘Proustian’. Those describing the decline of an aristocracy are likely to be labelled ‘Lampedusian’. The people responsible for these ugly, usually unsuitable adjectives are sometimes reviewers but more often the culprits are publishers ...”

“... expresses itself in social reproduction.” Thank you very much. Young made his early reputation by his work in urban anthropology (Family and Kinship in East London) and then, even more, by a piece of sociological analysis in the guise of Science Fiction. The Rise of the Meritocracy was a sensation of the Fifties, not ...”

“... The Dam Busters, shown on BBC Television one Sunday afternoon recently, must be the perfect war film for people like myself who don’t really approve of war, or of the military mystique of competitive valour and unquestioning obedience to authority, or of the exploitation of these things for purposes of entertainment, but nevertheless go weak at the knees at the image of a flak-scarred Lancaster bomber coming in to land on a dandelion-strewn airfield at dawn somewhere in East Anglia in 1943 ...”

“... enterprise proved unsuccessful it provided him with a fund of experiences which he later enriched by further adventures in Texas, Mexico and North Africa. His travel sketches and accounts of experiences and characters met with in these adventures constitute an important part of his literary output. He returned to Scotland on his father’s death in 1883 and ...”

“... triumph for Roy Jenkins. The crowds which packed the silent, thoughtful meetings were drawn by him. The old ladies who switched tremulously and belatedly from the Tories switched to him. The clever-silly London journalists who explained why the SDP bubble was going to burst made their jokes at his expense. Defeat would have kept him out of the ...”

“... recent years should have been a breeding ground for parties of the ultra-Right. A country humbled by the loss of its imperial role, by its industrial decline compared to other major – and minor – powers, and by the failure of the nostrums prescribed ...”

“... never had much logic, inasmuch as entrepreneurial (or, for that matter, professional) skills are by no means a matter of upbringing or heredity. What the tradition in effect provided was a convenient myth to justify and to sustain paternal striving: for many a concern, the building-up or maintaining of something to pass on to one’s sons – or, in default ...”

“... This, as he is well aware, is what Whitman was prescribing when he urged the poet not to be meddlesome, but to allow experience to go from the composition without a shred of the composition. Whitman’s word for this is ‘candour’. For Gregory Corso, Karl Shapiro and Gary Snyder, poets of the San Francisco renaissance, the need was for a poetry ...”

“... most compelling contest so far has been the one between the vice-presidential candidates. Watched by nearly 20 million more people than the first McCain/Obama debate, viewers switched on in the hope or fear of witnessing one or other of the candidates go down in flames. For a while, the most intriguing aspect of the first debate was whether it would happen at ...”