“... serendipitously. No, it is Keiller’s praxis that defines what the films are, and while he may disavow the notion that they create a revolutionary new space, I believe the increasingly rhapsodic reception they have received over the years from members of ‘the current tendency’ speaks of their success in achieving exactly this. The ‘peculiar ...”

“... what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. It may be the stuff of a thousand blighted lives and of dozens of novels, but the hurt and amazement come fresh off the page. You may despise the lesson, but you had better learn it; of his adult self, John Burnside tells ...”

“... is history in a nutshell.’ And indeed it is. But whose history? Exemplary as this Irish martyr may be, the priest is unable to identify him because he does not feature in the standard martyrology of Irish nationalism. He is, of course, Oscar Wilde. By the time this satirical scene occurs, two-thirds of the way through At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill’s ...”

“... dominant version, liberalism – sets about applying morality to politics. In what future writers may come to think of as the palmy days of political moralism, theorists have tried to imagine what politics would be like if it were redesigned according to a moral prospectus. It is not usually thought that actually existing politics shadows moral norms very ...”

“... first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though she claimed to be ashamed of having defiled the streams of truth ‘with this Pagan mud’, she kept her translation by her and ...”

“... Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love ...”

“... since a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his ...”

“... so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic ...”

“... a monumental pair of binoculars as the entrance to the offices of a large advertising agency. This may suit the client, but it manipulates the rest of us, and reduces architecture to a 3-D billboard. The Pop dimension remains strong in his work, even when disguised as a symbolic use of otherwise abstract materials, colours and forms; and it came as no surprise ...”

“... novels and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... winner who cannot in fact swim, and by us, the readers.The joke, if it is a joke, is that heroism may be a function of incompetence. Or that we only have winners because we are losers. Or that being the best at something is being unable to do it. Or, indeed, that we have the wrong idea about what it is to swim, or to win a race, or even about what a race ...”

“... order to demonstrate that I have not inadvertently farted. The secretary looks up inquiringly. She may just be thinking I am uncomfortable. She may, on the other hand, be thinking I have farted, and not once but three times. I am attending a funeral. It is crowded with mourners, many of them friends and acquaintances. I do ...”

“... here the bombing is terrible. I hope the same thing never comes to Glasgow. Tell Annie, Jeannie, May, Katie and them all I was asking for them. I hope you and the kids are keeping well I will be here for some time yet. I will draw to a close sending you and the kids my best love. Michael A thin strip of darkness, the U-boat U.99, commanded by the ...”