“... escape the biological round of cultivation and consumption; it is a hopelessly natural object. It may, however, as anything in nature may, find its way into literature, and thence into the literature of literature, or in this instance Nature and Language. The subject of this jaunty, promising but muddled book is the ...”

“... vocabulary to do justice to dramatic effect. The impact, experienced immediately by the recipient, may be translated in recollection – and all dramatic criticism is ‘recollection’ – into various thought-moulds, and it is probable that the two views of his acting derived from similar immediate experiences. I would lay great stress on immediacy: what ...”

“... noun as object (and not a gerund or infinitive), and Wv5 indicates that the participle jazzed up may be used adjectivally. This information is not provided to Chambers-users, although they, on the other hand, are specifically informed by sep that they may properly say ‘Those barbarians have jazzed Palestrina up’ as ...”

“... flawed advantages of being ‘authorised’: there are no anecdotes here about what Louis B. Mayer may or may not have done to the pubescent Judy Garland, or others in his thrall. The worst that is said of the man many still speak of as a monster is that he was a ‘part-affectionate, part-retributive tyrant’. Where Mr ...”

“... Division has been Scotland’s arch-fiend and has always stood on “doctrinal purity”. It may be that we are like that and therefore any hope of our ever misgoverning ourselves may mercifully never be realised.’ The wry note in that last sentence wouldn’t have endeared him to the likes of MacDiarmid, and it must ...”

“... dialect poems are plainly superior to his poems in Standard English, much as Burns in Scots is, we may well think, better and more authentic than Burns in English. One who made the comparison with Burns was Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing in 1879 to Robert Bridges. Of Barnes’s dialect poems Hopkins says: ‘A proof of their excellence is that you ...”

“... voters get most of England’s news, often more quickly and more loudly than our own. On 13 May, an immigration enforcement van was spotted in Pollokshields, part of Sturgeon’s Glasgow Southside constituency. The van, in which two Indian men had been detained, was quickly surrounded by protesters demanding their neighbours’ release. The police were ...”

“... of her fright. The noir effect is a stand-in for the movies in general, and the corpse may well be Turner’s career. It’s all too much for her, and she goes off on a drinking binge, her old habit. The film is Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), soon to be shown in cinemas across the country. Pauline Kael thought it was ...”

“... exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia in 2008. That the pairing may seem a strange one – despite their friendship and collaboration – is testament to the different ways in which both artists have been typecast. The curators are keen to point out that each was mercurial from the start, assuming identities and casting them ...”

“... each patient how tightly they wish to adhere to ‘best practice’, discuss which side effects may be acceptable to them and which wouldn’t, and generally tailor their care as much as possible. The government’s health policy reached new levels of absurdity last October, when it was announced that GPs would be paid £55 for every diagnosis of dementia ...”

“... There is a masked ball where everyone is wearing some kind of bird face, and the avenger, who may at this point just be the faithful old retainer, since all we see of him is his suit, broad, stooped shoulders and magnificently feathered hawk’s head, rather surprisingly performs a few magic tricks, releasing doves into the air from what seemed to be ...”

“... On Sunday 16 May, a day before the IDF launched its long-awaited, well-planned attack on the civilian population of Rafah, the Israeli chief of staff, Major-General Moshe (Boogey) Ya’alon said it was ‘almost the last chance’ for such an operation and that ‘special conditions were in place’ for an imminent attack ...”

“... of the top and bottom of the quennet give the effect of a long Essex horizon, around which an eye may dart and pick out things in their severalness:Deserted benches      Resting gull      Tilted boat                                       Rotten hullThe short middle lines can be a bit like rivulets of ...”

“... that ‘dancing is often the only real, the only serious business’ in these movies, but we may not have remembered how much and how variously they are about dancing. In Shall We Dance a Russian star of classical ballet played by Fred Astaire wants to tap like Fred Astaire, although his manager thinks this slip into popular nonsense ...”

“... and Noah Baumbach), a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other problems is that it doesn’t change enough. But we understand the horror.If we had been born into a place designed to exclude change and many other inconveniences, a place where we ...”