“... condemnation of communism. Qasem welcomed Barzani back, needing his support to shore up his young regime, and made him certain promises regarding Kurdish autonomy. But soon his Arab nationalism bumped up against the Kurdish variety, and by 1961 the two men had fallen out again. Qasem may also have calculated that he no longer needed the ...”

“... to the Melbury area went back for generations. His mother was born in Melbury Osmond, and as a young woman she worked in service for the Earl of Ilchester’s uncle, and later for the earl’s brother-in-law. She and Hardy’s father were married in Melbury Osmond Church in 1839. As Hardy grew up he must have listened to many stories of Melbury life, and ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”

“... correspondence about what to do. Ida sensibly argued with both parties that Edna was simply too young to know her own mind, which may well have been precisely the reason Clarke Hall and so many other 19th-century men wanted to marry teenage girls. Ellen Terry had been 16 when she married the 46-year-old artist G.F. Watts, Ruskin was the same age when he ...”

“... are things we know innately, though the knowledge may be tacit or unconscious. He was struck by young children’s capacity to form and understand phrases and sentences without being taught. ‘The poverty of the stimulus’ they received – the brevity of their contacts with the world – suggested the inadequacy of behaviourist explanations for language ...”

“... late in the novel when a friend of Emira’s seems more like a caricature of herself, and of a young Black woman generally, than the nuanced person we met earlier in the novel. That characterisation bothered me, but I was forced to reckon with my own expectations: does that one flat character help to underscore the point of a book like this? Books can be ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... of the ‘National Bibliographic Service Organisational Chart’; ‘Boston Spa Director General David Russon viewing new digital storage and transmission equipment’ (‘Director General’! – Gogol lives); the conveyor channels of the new ‘Mechanical Book Handling System’ (tactfully, the Electric Dutch shelves which ran amok compacting their ...”

“... whose recent work is shown to supports hers are Marc Shell, Kurt Heinzelman, Jerome Christensen, David Simpson, Heather Glen, Paul Magnuson, Lucy Newlyn, Raimonda Modiano and Alan Liu. Titles which reflect their common interests include Heinzelman’s The Economics of Literature and Modiano’s ‘The Ethics of Gift Exchange and Literary Ownership’. To ...”

“... fifty years put together. The exception that proves the rule is Dickens, who became so famous so young that people carefully preserved the wonder-boy’s missives: as a result, the majestic Pilgrim Edition, in progress now for nearly a quarter of a century, is only half-way through his creative life. The letters of a writer like Hardy or Johnson, in which ...”

“... discovery concerns a school for ‘difficult’ adolescents in Pennsylvania to which the young Robert Zimmerman was sent by his parents, who seem to have believed his nonconformity indicated genuine psychological problems, for an unspecified period in 1959. The dirge-like ‘Walls of Red Wing’ (1963) describes the harsh regime of a boy’s reform ...”

“... as heat is of flame, whiteness of snow.This last lecture was introduced by the theologian David Tracy, who talked briefly about Derrida’s influence on Christian, Jewish and Buddhist studies. During the applause, a balding, young man made his way to the stage carrying an enormous potted plant, which he presented to ...”

“... the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because he is not content to fool around, playing one ...”

“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a ...”

“... to sharpen the policy of reprisals. This unit was commanded by an unusually aggressive and devious young major named Ariel Sharon. Sharon and his men blew up 45 houses and killed 69 Jordanians, the majority of them women and children. Sharon was apparently well pleased with the operation, which in some quarters earned him the title ‘the murderer of ...”