“... running away. The soldiers order the shopkeepers to clear away a barricade hurriedly assembled by young protesters. Teargas lingers in the air, but the incident is over. It is a typical day in Gaza, except that no one appears to have been killed or injured in the confrontation between the over-equipped Israeli Army of occupation and the Palestinians who want ...”

“... might have been roped in from the group on the corner outside The Good Mixer. The priest is a young Irish boy with a big red peasant face and sandy hair and he, too, stripped of his cream-coloured cassock, could be wielding a pneumatic drill in the roadworks outside. I keep thinking about these characters during the terrible service and it reinforces what ...”

“... into her past and there are swarms of peripheral characters. Some (like the Dutchman with whom the young Liz made love on a Channel ferry in a force nine gale) cross the novel several times, but one never has the sense that this is a small world. Like the novel, it sprawls. Each of the leading trio of heroines has a brush with the dark side: madness, child ...”

“... years from 1904 to 1915, spent in Trieste, saw the completion of Dubliners, the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the composition of Exiles and Giacomo Joyce, and the beginning of Ulysses. He returned briefly to Dublin in 1919-20, but by 1915 his artistic soul was forged. The ...”

“... well prepared for the challenge of restoring order in post-Saddam Iraq. Many of the half-educated young conservative activists who arrived in the first wave had spent their youth drinking neoliberal Kool-Aid, imbibing the illusion that freedom depends on ‘the near complete dismantling of government’. Such historically illiterate ideologues weren’t about ...”

“... her sights on a man who had spent much of his life at court under her father’s guidance: Francis Stephen, who was nine years her senior and inherited the small duchy of Lorraine in 1729. He was persuaded – with some difficulty – to renounce his hereditary rights and the provincial charms of Nancy and Lunéville. In exchange, he was offered the grand ...”

“... disputed, and/or cannot be enforced? This is the problem addressed by both these excellent books. Stephen Wilson’s canvas is narrower, but it enables him to ground his analysis in a wealth of illustrative detail. Nobody in Corsica had ever had a monopoly of violence; and the French authorities who tried to establish one in the century after the island ...”

“... writers so rarely use the phrase ‘my husband’. Then it started to happen again and again. Stephen Amidon, we are told in the Contributors’ Notes, ‘lives in London with his wife and daughter Clementine’. Mr Amidon’s daughter has a name, apparently, but ‘his wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man ...”

“... habit; Shane McGowan falls apart under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol; David Crosby and Stephen Stills are ‘too coked-up all the time’ to keep their band together; and – playing in front of a ‘zombie’ audience – the New York Dolls announce their desire to be ‘the tackiest boys in New York’ and no one, but no one, is arguing. In the ...”

“... Brenda Maddox’s use of them in her book on Nora, and the iron curtain which in retaliation Stephen Joyce has dropped around his grandfather’s flame. In Professor A.N. Other’s hands, this would have been a duller and more comprehensively researched book. Probably F.R. Leavis is long enough dead (although the keepers of his gem-like flame remain ...”

“... has faced the choice of war or peace on some ten or twelve occasions during my lifetime. I was too young to have an opinion on the outbreak of the First World War, then known as the Great War. Thereafter I assumed I should always be against war even when it was conducted in the name of collective security. I opposed going to war over Manchuria in 1932 and ...”

“... looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the sonnets, whose notion of willing sacrifice in a noble cause had unerringly caught the public mood in this early ...”

“... aspirations (by which is usually meant socialism), but most of them have been haut bourgeois – Stephen Spender writing of cogs, driving-belts and the beauty of labour – lacking first-hand knowledge of the material they deal in. Douglas Dunn, impeccably proletarian and Left-inclining, once wrote memorably about a backstreet in Hull – but he, it turns ...”

“... cargoes); it is still possible to work aloft as a topman, encountering many of the same dangers as Stephen Taylor’s subjects did – but few of those who write about seamen have ever gone aloft on a dirty night to lay out on a yard and hand sail. There is at least one modern authority (Sam Willis) who deliberately went to sea in square rig to learn the trade ...”

“... It sometimes happens that an exceptionally talented person dies rather young, leaving behind him friends, still in their prime, who happen to be good writers – witness the posthumous celebrations of Shelley and D.H. Lawrence. Mark Boxer was famous at Cambridge; he was even famous for the manner of his leaving it; and then, without serious intermission, he became and remained famous in London ...”