“... compared Hillary Clinton’s defeat to watching Joan of Arc burning at the stake. Obama was in St Paul, Minnesota, pointedly in the very arena where the Republicans will hold their convention in September, at times barely audible over the nearly continual cheering of 17,000 fans (with another 15,000 listening outside). Clinton was off on what has come to be ...”

“... continent, but a place so bare and sterile he called it Desolation Island. The name provides Jean-Paul Kauffmann with the title of the second of his travel books to be translated into English. The first, The Dark Room at Longwood, recorded a visit to St Helena (‘the middle of nowhere’), the scene of Napoleon’s final exile and death. Voyage to Desolation ...”

“... Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by ...”

“... with payment records and phone data detailing their contact with journalists, pleaded guilty. PC Paul Flattley, who was stationed in Kensington and Chelsea, received a total of £7500 for 39 tips: he told the paper about the theft of a handbag from Zara Phillips, and about Hans Rausing’s failure to stop after a traffic accident. Flattley’s handler, the ...”

“... Heaney in Wintering Out, the jokey juxtaposition of national matters and erotic ones is more like Paul Muldoon. ‘Pobl y Cwm’, for instance (‘people of the valley’), records changes in the Rhondda through terrible puns (‘We’ve no news of King Coal’) and an outrageous final conceit: They’re expanding The factory at Merthyr That makes Janet ...”

“... In late​ 2004, Boris Johnson cowered in a ‘cold, damp three-star hotel’ in Liverpool, worried that if he went outside he’d be attacked. He had embarked on what he called ‘Operation Scouse-grovel’, after the magazine he edited, the Spectator, published an (unsigned) editorial describing Liverpudlians as having ‘a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche’: ‘They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it ...”

“... known as ideas, which is one of the least creditable reasons to admire Cobbett, Orwell or Samuel Johnson. If they aren’t able to extricate the man or woman ‘behind’ the work, they tend to feel a little cheated. Their fondness for biography, a superior version of what the media know as ‘human interest’, goes hand in hand with their philistinism. It ...”

“... Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ‘performance answering performance’, suddenly insist on ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices and ...”

“... it seems to me, do they diagnose the real challenge which Derrida is now obliged to face. Barbara Johnson’s painstaking translation of La Dissémination (1972) certainly comes to us as a dividend of American preoccupation with Derrida. But the questions which it raises go beyond his current notoriety, and recall us to the literary and intellectual context ...”

“... least partly fictional (A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as recounted by the ...”

“... repression it met with, is, in retrospect, an extraordinary thing in itself. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Charlotta Bass, Claudia Jones and William Patterson in the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Panther Party connected the oppression of black America to people of colour around the globe, linking the internal struggle against racism in the US to ...”

“... popular and influential in their time. They range from the work of witty polemicists like Harvey Johnson, who in 1903 examined the failings of white society, asking whether whites could ever be trusted to govern themselves, to that of entertaining frauds like J.E. Blayechettai, a lecturer on the black church circuit in the Twenties, who claimed to be an ...”

“... of literature: while we need not believe, as the Florentines of Petrarch’s day did, that St Paul wept at Virgil’s tomb, neither should we suppose that, even though his Roman flock spoke Greek, he could get by in that city without understanding a word of Latin. Nor indeed, although it has virtually monopolised the study of Roman bilingualism, was Greek ...”

“... with other novels, even those that are called experimental. Usually in such books – in B.S. Johnson, say, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) – the messing around with words is designed to be expressive: this page is split in half because the character is in two minds; this page is fragmented because the character ...”