“... took out a cut-throat razor and slashed Joyce’s face. The wound required 26 stitches and left a savage scar that swept across his face from his ear to the corner of his mouth. It made him, at the age of 18, a celebrity within the burgeoning Fascist movement; for the first time, he featured on the front pages of the papers. He called his scar ‘the Lambeth ...”

“... noted his arrival at Piccadilly Station on 30 January. On Sunday 2 February he was the victim of a savage attack in Longsight, half a mile from the massive Police Station that looms over the Stockport Road like a cliff of brick. He recognised his attackers as the same two men who had interviewed him in Bootle Street nine months previously. With a broken ...”

“... with clouds of burning incense. The rest of the house is lugubrious, the grounds guarded by savage dogs that can be called off only by shouting commands in German (Sitz! Platz! Auf!). Every night she lets her guest choose another of her films to watch; she keeps the reels in a frigidaire. In a safe beside her bed she hides her jewels, tapes of her ...”

“... palette had meanwhile become. As a result, the charge that he wasn’t saying much returned with savage force in Desmond Fennel’s 1991 pamphlet Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney Is No.1.Although this polemic is driven by too crude a notion of what ‘saying something’ amounts to in poetry, it does have the mind-focusing audacity to ask ...”

“... really rather a curiosity.’ In truth, nothing quite like it had been achieved or attempted since Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred (1740), produced for the Prince of Wales and chiefly memorable for including the first performance of ‘Rule, Britannia’. Seven months later, when the music critic of the Times (unaware of Sheffield’s undertaking) suggested that ...”

“... likely to produce revulsion in the reader. It’s hard to imagine that Enrigue, starting from that savage brushstroke, could manage to build up something close to a balanced portrait of Moctezuma, but he does. He also successfully handles a large cast of characters in a modestly proportioned book, and even throws in the hook of thriller intrigue for the ...”

“... currency for every Eurozone country,’ the French economist Michel Aglietta and his co-author, Thomas Brand, write in Un New Deal pour l’Europe. ‘It binds them to rigidly fixed exchange rates, regardless of their underlying economic realities, and strips them of monetary autonomy.’ For Aglietta, a currency is essentially a social contract: behind it ...”

“... and accepted the role of a kind of maîtresse en titre to Beckett, a role that makes her – like Thomas MacGreevy in the first and Georges Duthuit in the second – the star correspondent in this third volume of his letters. When he tuned in to the Duras broadcast, Beckett was fifty and felt that he was, so to speak, failing upward. ‘Not to want to ...”

“... largely ended with Beckett – of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character, but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous ...”

“... wrote to a friend about the atmosphere in the house. ‘Egotism both greedy and afraid, once savage, wasting away as a kill-joy, gnawing at its own loneliness and despair.’ McGahern told Monteith: ‘My father says that [The Barracks] is an immoral disgrace and has called here from the country with that priest of my adolescence. I am afraid I am just ...”

“... market, as he understood it. In 1873, he tells Tissot he is working on a picture specifically for Thomas Agnew; he also thinks that the firm might like to handle his early masterpiece Portraits dans un bureau, since it depicted the New Orleans cotton exchange; he presumed that Agnew’s, which had started in Manchester, would easily find a ...”

“... of the man behind that dandy performance lives again in a reprint of England and the Octopus, his savage manifesto of 1928 against market-forced building and architecture, ribbon-building particularly. Before its publication, he had been active in the Design and Industries Association (DIA), the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), the ...”

“... this key. And in a certain phase of life – with male adolescents it may come from a reading of Thomas Wolfe – the gratification of such writing can be immense. How much of Agee is like this? Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the most ambitious and fully worked of his books, and the solemnities of diction, circumstantial proofs of localism, and care ...”

“... Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”