“... wolfish spirits of place, skulking guardians of something that has been lost, circumnavigate the major tourist attractions without feeling any obligation to beg or charm. They are the unculled, collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: heavy-pelted German Shepherds, down on their luck, war veterans with a folk memory of clover-munching ...”

“... set of characters? Our sympathies are ‘never … strongly enlisted in any of the three [major characters]’, one contemporary reviewer complained. Another felt the book’s disregard for realism reached levels ‘repugnant to our sense of the probable’. Its ‘people talk as no people ever talked before’, wrote a third, and ‘the story strikes ...”

“... of the subgenre, the time-travel narrative, is as exceptional among and uncharacteristic of their major texts as SF itself is with regard to official Literature. To be sure, so-called alternative or counterfactual histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which ...”

“... were looking at a grave, just covered.By contrast, despite her pleas and those of the C-in-C, Sir John French, it was not until the end of May 1915 that Asquith himself visited the Front – one more indication of how wrong his wife was when she claimed that ‘Henry was born for this war.’ The Brocks​ repeatedly tug our attention to Asquith’s hopeless ...”

“... Introduction includes some useful biographical facts it cannot balance the loss. Of the major characters, Rajah Amar is gradually and unexpectedly moved into the centre of the action. Buddhist self-discipline has brought him to the point where he feels fitted for withdrawal from the world – once he has fulfilled his last responsibility of ...”

“... some of them. Blindness and Insight was his first collection, published in 1971; a second major book, Allegories of Reading, appeared in 1980.* Anyone who has read even a single essay of de Man’s can gauge the quality of his mind. Many of his early pieces circulated as if they were dangerous to the academy, and assured him a samizdat reputation. His ...”

“... observing the law – ‘lest terrorists win by inducing a kind of bunker terrorism’. John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses legitimacy and terrorism, pointing out that the armed struggle of the underground partisans against the Nazi occupation was perfectly ...”

“... Culler’s job is to portray him as a Modern Master – even Thody speaks of Barthes as a ‘major French writer’ without any sort of qualification – and he does this with subtlety and skill. There are many modes of mastery and Culler suggests Barthes possesses ‘a special sort ... suited to experimentation with the intelligibilities of our ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... but Gelpi is confident that his reassessment of his work, ‘will confirm his place as one of the major British poets of this century’. From the outset, readers of the book are left in little doubt that they are privileged to be witnessing a redemption, a reversal of Day Lewis’s unfortunate fall, with Gelpi casting himself in the role of saviour. Living ...”

“... once they posed a serious threat to the authority of the state. Union density declined in all the major industrial countries at the same time as it did in Britain. The successes Thatcher was able to achieve, in her own terms, in domestic policy were as much a symptom of how the country had changed as a consequence of her desire to change it. After ...”

“... Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby joining a group of major cities led by black politicians. A number of these cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Newark – would be ravaged by deindustrialisation, but at the time they were laboratories for black political power. Washington’s victory was particularly sweet. It ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... future. You would be wrong.The International Energy Agency (IEA), which keeps tabs on all the major players in the industry, released a report in January which shows that renewable energy and carbon capture technologies currently represent just under 1 per cent of the industry’s investments. BP does slightly better than some of its competitors, with ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”