“... Dante, Michelangelo and Shakespeare did, as well as more recent experimenters such as Hopkins, John Berryman or the sub-Prynnean Tony Lopez. Donne and Hopkins used sonnets as vehicles for religious anguish because it’s so easy to suggest that they’re buckling under pressure, that the spirit will not run true to the form, or to God. The sonnet has a ...”

“... if and when India and China catch up with the levels of meat consumption in the West. One of the major consequences of an expanding middle class in Asia has been a huge rise in meat-eating. By 2022, China will be importing more soya for chickenfeed than the whole of Brazil currently produces: 102 million tonnes. One of the surest signs of affluence is and ...”

“... of American writers have accomplished something original with the novel form in his wake – John Hawkes, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Renata Adler, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin come to mind – but innovative narrative fiction has enjoyed far greater support from publishers and readers in Europe. The bulk of published American fiction ...”

“... most of two towns which the US had made huge efforts to secure: Fallujah and Ramadi. These were major symbolic victories that helped establish Baghdadi’s reputation as the world’s foremost jihadi leader. Unlike al-Qaida’s Zawahiri, he was winning battles on the ground. Things were also moving ahead in Syria. In the summer of 2011, when it looked as if ...”

“... military and industrial espionage. Cyber-warfare became one of the administration’s major themes. In October 2012, the secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, raised the stakes further by declaring that the outcome of a concerted attack on key US systems and networks ‘could be a cyber Pearl Harbor’. Cyber-warfare was now assumed to pose a ...”

“... in our relation to Abstract Expressionism. Not so long ago, on entering the white-walled room in a major museum housing the Pollocks, the Stills, the Rothkos and the Newmans, you could easily persuade yourself that here was the culmination of many things. Here, on these outsized canvases, the moment was recorded when New York muscled out Paris as the capital ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... would go on to publish around thirty books, including titles by Clive Matson, Michael McClure and John Ashbery as well as Audre Lorde’s collection The First Cities.Despite her centrality to the community of artists and writers on the Lower East Side, di Prima’s work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ‘outriders’. She was excluded ...”

“... possible to attend occasional inaugural lectures and dinners which flash one back to the world of John Buchan. I make him a present of one such occasion: as a Rhodes Scholar I was wont to go to the annual Rhodes dinners, loud with the sort of rhetoric which would make Hitchens blench. Traditionally, there had been toasts to the Founder (Rhodes), the ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and tolerably easy of ...”

“... country almost a year early, leading to Labour’s shock defeat in June 1970. Crossman’s other major failure was his attempt to do something about Labour’s constantly repeated pledges to abolish, or at least to reform, the House of Lords. He decided to go for reform, and succeeded in negotiating a scheme which would have ended the hereditary ...”

“... is an intolerant, segregationalist, medieval, fanatical, cruel religion’. No other major cultural group could be spoken of in this way, yet the context, framework, setting of any discussion has been limited, indeed frozen, by these ideas. There has seemed to be a kind of pleasure in the prospect of the Arabs as represented by Saddam at last ...”

“... themselves to the degree that their predecessors were able to do in the last century, or that Mrs Major still does today. And of course even if they were able to insist on a strictly private role their position would still allow them extraordinary opportunities. Assuming that they occupy the same beds as their husbands, Presidential wives are guaranteed time ...”

“... which can proceed only by conflict to rupture.’ Keeping women under control used to be a major, if mythical and mythicised, occupation for men because it could be assumed that women (mythically) represent untamed nature, brutishness, base matter. Woman is Animal. Yet, as Warner points out, Woman functions in the myths as the animal self more ...”

“... soft centre, sometimes farcical, usually earnest, and always controversial, of a whole cluster of major intellectual concerns. Here the contrary waves of credulity and scepticism were constantly colliding. On the one hand, spiritualism was not free of the superstition that had always been a part of society’s perennial attempt to pierce beyond physical ...”