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“... had those teachers been in a position to quote what Geoffrey Grigson wrote four decades later, in Stephen Spender’s volume of memorial tributes. There, talking about the first poem of Auden’s which he had encountered, one never to be republished, Grigson spoke of its having arisen out of an ‘Englishness’ until then unexpressed or not isolated in a ...”

“... book, Writing Degree Zero, with Elements of Semiology, was translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith in 1967, and this volume is now reissued. The Fashion System appears in English for the first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the ...”

“... an academic career in North America – Vice-President of the University of Toronto, President of Smith College. Her childhood memories, on a pastoral station deep in New South Wales, begin with the elemental force of the flat, baked earth, the endless horizon and the harsh light. This is the site of a ‘bush ethos’ which she characterises in familiar ...”

“... not 16. Anyone in any doubt should have compared the speech by the civilised and courageous Chris Smith with that of the bigot Tony Marlowe. ‘Predatory’ is a word much in evidence, the frail faltering flame of heterosexuality always in danger of being snuffed out by the hot homosexual wind. 1 March. It seems pretty well accepted now that much of one’s ...”

“... expression of this view occurred in a recent letter to the London Review of Books. Its writer, Mr Stephen Logan, elegantly transforms Eliot’s parenthetic observation that ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent’ into a pronouncement that intelligence is ‘largely a matter of perceiving the disabling restrictions of method’. I doubt whether ...”

“... them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline or a ...”

“... to the death penalty today,’ he says, ‘is the contemporary equivalent of abolitionism.’ Stephen Bright, the lead counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, whose archives were the starting point for McFeely’s exploration of the way capital punishment actually works, sees himself as belonging to a tradition that goes back to the early days of ...”

“... piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to Lorenzo’s cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, but in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s city house – a discovery which does not ...”

“... only character in my books is the place itself, London.’ He could be quoting from the poet Stephen Rodefer: ‘My programme is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation.’ Home’s language feeds on metropolitan restlessness, movement, lists of trains and buses, gigs in pubs, rucks outside phone kiosks, the epiphany of the grease ...”

“... books on them’, included David Bonavia of the Times in London, Anthony Astrachan and Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, Robert Kaiser and Kevin Klose of the Washington Post, David Satter of the Financial Times and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Denis Blakeley. Reading the list, I found myself mentally running through the names of noted Moscow ...”

“... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...”

“... the local church ‘with rather deceitful blue eyes’ (‘he makes eyes at Barbara Tox and Gwen Smith now’), and ‘Ronald’, ‘quite a common sort of youth, but rather good-looking’, and ‘another romance where I never said a word’. Next she lists her ‘cracks’, or crushes, at school, no longer conjuring the world of the silent screen but of ...”

“... another, which can become a fairly gentle way of describing your own personal history, too. John Smith, the late Labour leader, believed a devolved Scottish parliament was ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. He died too young and is buried now on the Isle of Iona, in what is thought to have been the graveyard of the Scottish kings. There’s a ...”

“... Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Randy Scruggs, Connie Smith, Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam – a who’s who of Nashville, Austin and Bakersfield turned out for Burns’s camera, 85 strong. They’re a pleasure to watch, and if they’re dishonest, they’re disarming about it. ‘Truth-telling,’ Ketch Secor says in ...”

“... aboriginal calamity’ lurked in the prehistory of mankind. The doctrine, as the philosopher Stephen Mulhall says, makes us ‘always already errant before any particular errancy’, and it certainly stands at the opposite pole to ‘a liberal understanding of human values as the self-originating sources of moral value’: political activity usually ...”