“... Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the ...”

“... on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... problem, possibly mental collapse. ‘If you come he would not know you,’ Frances wrote to Fr John O’Connor, the priest who had inspired the character of Father Brown.After G.K. slowly recovered, Cecil enlisted. In the New Witness he had been trying to keep up with the Daily Mail, warning of potential treachery from hotel-owners with Jewish and ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... United States must be masters of this weapon of the future,’ concluded the officer in charge, Major-General A.M. Cameron. But by the criteria of conventional artillery, the V2s were found to be hopelessly inaccurate. The invention of the A-bomb, and then in 1952 of the H-bomb, transformed rocket research. The first delivery system commissioned for the ...”

“... Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s view, it seems probable ‘that the student with an authentic literary vocation may be the one who feels least at ...”

“... sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay bookstores can be found in most major cities in the US and UK, their shelves packed with fiction about gay and lesbian life. In two decades, a few dozen books have become many thousands, so many that the single genre of gay literature has now spawned many subgenres: in fiction alone there are ...”

“... Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for Sartre, Camus and herself, she announced that the Chicago lover was Algren. Even so, Beloved Chicago Man is a revelation. Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren are, from beginning to end, among the most ...”

“... Moynihan of Leeds was so well satisfied with the progress of surgery as to declare that no further major advances were to be expected. I wonder whether the success of surgery in the early decades of the century, combined with the relative impotence of medicine, was responsible for the traditional rivalry of self-esteem between physicians and surgeons, as I ...”

“... thought of calling it a ‘hub’, has been struggling for months, with services discontinued and major elements hidden behind fences, while corporate mouthpieces attempt to justify the station’s fortunate position as a satellite of London’s tallest building. Shardenfreude. London Bridge station is now an embarrassed and aggressively apologetic commuter ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... Said says, after pointing out that ‘there was a virtual epidemic of Orientalia affecting every major poet, essayist and philosopher of the period … this is a later transposition eastwards of a similar enthusiasm in Europe for Greek and Latin antiquity during the High Renaissance.’ But the resemblance with the Renaissance ends there. The Orient, in ...”