“... a ‘historic opportunity’ – that is the phrase that keeps recurring – to break out of their corner and restore relations with the United States. Women and young people, with their vigils for the American dead, express both an ardent sympathy for a loss they comprehend and an intense frustration with the stale taboos of a superannuated revolutionary ...”

“... undermine Christianity, it has at least one proponent in the present US Congress, Representative Paul Broun of Georgia, who declared in September 2012: ‘All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that ...”

“... Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium ...”

“... too richly detailed to be bothered by heroes. If I walk down to the Bank of Ireland at the corner of Westland Row and Pearse Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National ...”

“... family home after an affair – it’s alleged – with the maid, he moved into a flat round the corner from it. In 1886 he quit the Conservatoire and volunteered for the army, then got bronchitis more or less deliberately a few months later by spending a winter night outside with no shirt on. He was back in Paris within a year, and on his return he got a ...”

“... It was a really hot July afternoon and I was five years old. There was a small sand heap on one corner of the grass not far from the garden swing and the old plum tree. I was a bit bored and listless. I had a white sunhat on and I was idly shovelling sand with a small tin seaside spade, red with a wooden handle. Carol was a bit further down the lawn away ...”

“... lived a life of stealthy masquerade as an English doctor, before committing suicide late in life; Paul Bereyter, a German who because of his part-Jewish ancestry was prohibited from teaching during the Third Reich, never recovered from this setback, and later committed suicide; Sebald’s great-uncle, Adelwarth, who arrived in America in the 1920s, worked as ...”

“... RAF documentary Squadron 992 and appearing as the compere in the variety show Rainbow Round the Corner. Along with the BBC’s senior announcer, Leslie Mitchell, he became a voice of authority, the tone of war and peace, the man whom people heard in the cinema on the newsreels produced by British Movietone. Gamlin was a star. Terence Gallacher, who worked ...”

“... the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more fashion-conscious than Todd; she knew people like Paul Poiret – the first person to design a dress, it’s said, that a woman could put on by herself. It’s not clear how the early editors were chosen, or what qualifications were expected in a country where to be fashionable had long meant to be vulgar and ...”

“... the eve of her wedding is a crawling (and well-founded) apprehension that disaster is around the corner. Our bodies make us know things our mind doesn’t quite know, or won’t accept: ambiguities in our situation, undeclared and forbidden loves and hatreds. How painful it would have been for Florence Nightingale’s family to face their mutual feints and ...”

“... of reading Nelson is getting introduced to them: Catherine Opie and A.L. Steiner, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, Ryan Trecartin and Mike Kelley, Nao Bustamante and William Pope.L. Nelson spends less time on work that, in her view, is stupid, arrogant or exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil ...”

“... moment in the Inferno when Paolo and Francesca share ‘a kiss both looked-for and unbidden’ (in Paul Batchelor’s translation) as they read. That’s another thing: Smith’s literariness comes through here as something more amusing; fragments with titles such as ‘Speak, radio’ and ‘Brideshead unvisited’ open up the story to give a parallel ...”

“... Perry Anderson writes about in his new book The H-Word.2 We have persuaded ourselves into a corner where governments believe they have no tools to address the shortfall in housing construction, especially social and low-cost housing. The best that successive governments have been able to do is to ‘leave it to the market’, even though the market has ...”