“... Its elliptic syntax and abrupt, verbless sentences often completely check the momentum. Yet this may well be its point. The decisive moment in the poem comes in stanza 30 when Bradstreet has now sooner invited consummation – ‘Kiss me’ – than dispatched it into the past – ‘That once.’ In the instant between these sentences Berryman is for the ...”

“... thorough judicial investigations, apparently on the basis of sheer political prejudice. Justice Richard Goldstone, for example, had conducted a major inquiry into the Sebokeng shootings of 1990, which concluded that a small police detachment, faced with a crowd of 50,000 demonstrators, had fired on them, killing five and wounding 161. Goldstone criticised ...”

“... Adolf Hitler or to die for him. The personality of the Führer had me totally in its spell.’ It may seem obvious that a barrage of propaganda played an important part in helping the Nazis to reach parts of the electorate the other parties failed to reach (such as first-time voters). But there are also good grounds for scepticism about the broader potency of ...”

“... the journey of many apprentice rulers in Shakespeare – Henry IV, Prince Hal becoming Henry V, Richard II in his fruitful desolation. But here the personal is inseparable from the public, and from the cosmic: in The Mahabharata, the Great Chain of Being has the limitless reverberations which Shakespeare fully attained only in his later tragedies and ...”

“... has to be shot, and she asks that Erick should despatch her. This is the coup de grâce. The plot may sound like an opera summary, but there are no arias. Erick tersely explains his rejection of the girl: ‘I was not prepared to regard Conrad as a brother-in-law. One does not drop a friend of 20 years’ standing, though radiantly young, for a shabby ...”

“... than the character, causes and implications of contemporary disputes, is the main subject. It may well be that the historical understanding thus arrived at will illuminate contemporary disputes, but there can be no assurance of this.Another approach is to assume that we know what the ‘crisis’ is and proceed to ask about its causes and prospects. This ...”

“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes feel. Miss Didion, however, has come out. She stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result ...”

“... today,’ he wrote when Governor Eyre declared martial law during the Morant Bay rebellion, ‘may be done in Ireland tomorrow and England hereafter.’ Edward Beesly, a member of the parliamentary Jamaica Committee, compared the rebellion to the Hyde Park demonstrations in support of universal male suffrage in 1866, and concluded that Harrison’s ...”

“... could approach by manipulating or kneading the reality and the living men who comprised it. Djilas may have recognised bits of himself in Stalin: in particular, the ‘final ideals’ behind the restless realism. ‘Because the true fanatical fervour was so clearly recognisable behind his cynicism,’ a Swiss journalist wrote years later, at the height of ...”

“... certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever allowed to make: previous tragic characters may have spoken of funerals, but they didn’t mention the cost of the catering or implicitly liken their remarried mothers to a meat dish inappropriately served twice. In Ivano-Frankivsk, as elsewhere when this play is done well, Hamlet’s line achieved a ...”

“... suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in 1968, which Richard Howard proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of our period’. Collected Poems appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major ...”

“... diplomats, writers and other extraordinary figures who lived in the city. (Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were also supported by the programme, though McKay was never close to either.) FWP resources allowed McKay to produce Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), a sociological study of cults, occultists and street-corner orators that includes discussions of ...”

“... unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain ...”

“... It is not merely the size of India; it is not merely the population of India – and I may say that one out of every four of the people represented at this conference is an Indian – it is that on purely objective economic criteria, India feels that she is an extremely important part of the world and will probably be an even more important part in ...”