“... the reader’s sympathy into places it might not otherwise be led, as in this passage where a young West Indian describes the trials of early marriage and parenthood: we walkin out good till de firss baby come: bonnet pram bootie wettin de bed: evry body stannin rounn cooin like woo-dove: look how e favour e faddah they sayin: look e lil booee eye an e ...”

“... the age of 17 and went underground, spending much of his spare time in the Barnsley branch of the Young Communist League. Some of the witnesses of his earliest political stirrings were impressed. Monty Meth, then a correspondent for the Daily Worker, remembers him as ‘very bright, always articulate’. Others, like Jimmy Reid, the Clydeside ...”

“... to a separate moral failing by which the happiness of women is undermined: love (or loving too young and too thoughtlessly), leasing (or lying) and jealousy. In fact the last two novellas form one connected story, which has been divided to make the book look like a sequel to Hogg’s earlier extraordinary romance, The Three Perils of Man. The ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”

“... an elaborately composed alternative, a dish of sliced fruits, before all of them, grandmothers to young children, sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in Asháninka. The woman who led me around the dance on our arrival now held out her hand. Each member of our party was guided, still road-dazed and masato-dizzy, to a stall of native crafts: bracelets, necklaces, bright ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... and the sentences are good.The door of Huston’s suite was opened by a conservatively attired young man with a round face and pink cheeks. He introduced himself as Arthur Fellows. ‘John is in the next room getting dressed,’ he said. ‘Imagine getting a layout like this all to yourself! That’s the way the big studios do things.’ He nodded with ...”

“... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...”

“... post or ‘elevated-sentry walk’. The conjecture was supported by further excavations, and the young man found himself acknowledged as a leading authority on British archaeology. He would maintain his eminence throughout his life, continuing to organise excavations and compile reports, making tens of thousands of meticulous drawings, and in the 1930s ...”

“... the uprising began, but the euphoria in Tahrir Square already seems like a distant memory. The young people who launched the revolution are still protesting, but they have been outflanked by the hard men, the soldiers and Islamist politicians now calling the shots. The Mubarak regime was replaced by a military junta, the 20-member Supreme Council of the ...”

“... pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’. The relationship cooled when Ken junior joined the Labour Party and ceased completely when he became leader of the Greater London Council, but for a time they lived under the same roof in an intimate and sometimes disagreeable household that ...”

“... a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two or three books; some, like Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, have successful careers and lives elsewhere. Their work is not part of the long 20th century; they are not a necessary component of a post-colonial efflorescence, as ...”

“... officials: a Democrat state assembly member, Alec Brook-Krasny, and a Republican state senator, David Storobin. ‘It took the Greeks two generations to produce one elected politician,’ a local journalist told me proudly. ‘We have two already and they were both born in Russia.’ ‘Russians think they own everything,’ said Bella Rappaport, the woman ...”

“... from the umbilical cord, but in other, less truncated versions of her life she shapes events at a young age. ‘Practice makes perfect’ – one of the refrains of the book. It takes her several goes (several deaths and new beginnings) before she succeeds, aged eight, in preventing Bridget the housemaid from going up to London for the Armistice celebrations ...”

“... her the time she needed to write her first novel, the notorious Baise-Moi (1993), in which two young women cross France on an ultra-violent sex and murder spree. The rage that fuels both it and the film that followed has to do with economics and cultural capital as much as sex. In Baise-Moi one reason the heroines go berserk is that the tougher of ...”