“... no further use for the poem itself: indeterminacy thus insures a poem against prompt expiry and may even keep it enduringly fresh. Furthermore, if a poem can be paraphrased, it will fail to reflect the radically ‘meaningless’, indeterminate nature of our experience. Derek Walcott’s poems, informed and invigorated as many them are by a coherent ...”

“... insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable: but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation or even malice, is any less genuine.’ Here, en toutes lettres, is the polemicist’s warrant. Edward’s own indignations of this period were literary carmagnoles, without ...”

“... to be found the descriptions of the actual processes’ by which we die. This is fine, and others may have got it wrong, but in his grounds for denying the authority of experience to others Dr Nuland, too, is mistaken. Before our century there would have been no adult who had not seen – literally seen – some of his or her children, friends and, of ...”

“... heated by stoves’ contrasted with Fielding, who resembles ‘an open lawn, on a breezy day in May’. Most of the themes of Richardson criticism, before and since, are contained in Coleridge’s comments, and the blend of admiration and repugnance belonged to the case from the start. Contemptuous adversaries like Fielding himself paid glowing tributes to ...”

“... point is the Government taking control of people, taking their guns away.’ In her testimony on 5 May Ms McVeigh confirmed on oath that she had read The Turner Diaries at her brother’s repeated urgings. But now, as a principal prosecution witness (in return for immunity), she seemed less inclined to defend McVeigh’s favourite novel. You can buy The Day of ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”

“... is a belief in technical feasibility, and this provides one of the volume’s staple concerns. It may not be stretching terms too far to label the interest which in each case is engaged an aesthetic one. In The New German Mentality Marcuse wrote that Nazism ‘mobilises the mythological layer of the human mind, which constituted the vast reservoir of the ...”

“... against the view that the appeal of ideologies ought to be explained in economic terms. It may be that both believe that there is no general argument to be had, and that the most one can do is drive Marxists and Whigs out of one position at a time. But both are faced with the awkward question whether the intellectual constructions they attend to ...”

“... narrator, whose attitudes and motives become increasingly sinister towards the end of the book, may be as unreliable a guide to what happens in these stories as he usually is in Hogg’s fiction. He has a hard time making the stories fit the title: each story is a compendium of all three perils, and in the second, two-part story his sententious insistence ...”

“... Even​ if you’ve never heard a single thing Solange has recorded, you might still know that in May 2014, in the lift of a luxury hotel in Manhattan, on the starry, starry night of the annual Met Gala, she took a swing (or several) at her sister Beyoncé’s husband, the rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z. ‘Leaked’ security camera footage from inside the lift showed a shocked Jay-Z, a flustered bear of a bodyguard, Solange a kung-fu blur and the expressionless statue of Beyoncé ...”

“... executed for a crime of which ‘I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty than any of you who may now be hearing me.’ Cautioned by the sheriff, he signed off with the hope that ‘the principles of freedom, of humanity and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human ...”

“... in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one thermonuclear, at Pokhran in May 1998; and Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Richelson presents each of these cases with his usual deep immersion in detail – sometimes failing to produce much in the way of insight or analysis. During World War Two, the ...”

“... of self-importance’. It attached even to his private writings, notably his surviving letters to Robert Harley, soon to be secretary of state and eventually unofficial prime minister. Harley rescued Defoe from Newgate, after he was convicted of seditious libel. He wanted to use him, and gave him a heady sense of influence over the times. For the first decade ...”

“... Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the imagination struggles. The best it can do is a jam jar with a newt inside: the boy is ...”

“... we drop down into Kendal and the Abbot Hall gallery, where there is a touring exhibition of Robert Bevan pictures. The shows at Abbot Hall are just the right size, and never more than three or four rooms. The Bevans are shown alongside other Camden Town paintings, the best of which is a lovely, glowing, slightly abstract picture by Spencer Gore, The ...”