“... to have a celestial source: she’s at the business of larking with the metaphysical again. Her light, worldly novels don’t exclude a salutary touch of the ineffable. There is always, for this author, some unspoken observer of people’s antics – and this makes things gloriously intriguing and rum. Her ability to shape flawless, droll, astringent ...”

“... turf, grounded in the undergrowth of a forest. These works often use materials that have come to light in the place itself – leaves, rubbed red stones, dry sticks, thorns, the dark fluid from mushroom gills, stones picked from scree, blocks of snow and slivers of ice, earth, deer-dung, scrap iron, fern fronds, spruce thinnings and off-cuts. In this, the ...”

“... on the one hand, Joyce and Woolf; on the other, Dorothy Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and Thirties, Richardson’s work was frequently linked with that of Joyce and Woolf. By the time of Joyce’s death, his reputation was firmly ...”

“... wonders what this can mean. ‘Sometimes a woman is just a woman,’ Johnny says. ‘Before you light her up?’ Patrick asks. ‘No, no, that’s a cigar,’ says Johnny. The two men are then joined by Julia: ‘We’ve all been wondering what you’re up to,’ said Julia. ‘Are you baying at the moon, or working out the meaning of ...”

“... In this way, ‘Days’, though it has larger and more interesting ends in view, throws some light on the odd gaps between ‘life’ and ‘literature’, and on the always obscure and tangled relations that exist between them before ‘days’ become poems and a life turns into Works. One of the most absorbing subjects available to literary scholarship ...”

“... the cottages have been built. Expressionist weather systems have been brought indoors, a wall of light in the smokey darkness. These endearing celebrations of place glisten in the firelight, when the rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked ...”

“... derives its artistic weight, while the ambition of a work such as Troilus is its undoing. A light-music element is found throughout Walton’s oeuvre, not only in Troilus (Pandarus’s scene at the start of Act Two is one instance) and, less surprisingly, in the one-act comedy of The Bear (Smirnov’s song, ‘Madame, je vous prie’), but even in the ...”

“... and findings, and point to intense pressure for results from frustrated military officers. In the light of these accounts, Abu Ghraib does seem to have been exceptional in its vulnerability to mortar attack, its radically overcrowded conditions, its low morale and obscure command structure, lack of coherent record-keeping and prisoner identification, and for ...”

“... like a fishing smack’.) And he solemnly unveils a growing self-conception as the Raymond Aron of light entertainment. ‘This was worthwhile,’ he writes of a sketch he directed for the Cambridge Footlights. ‘Sartre hailing the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an act of liberation: that was a waste of time.’ The sketch which James is proud of was called ...”

“... the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a ...”

“... Commander under whom in the West that victory was won. It should come as no surprise that in the light of history Dwight Eisenhower’s personal contribution to that immense achievement should appear more considerable than is implied by the titular and public relations role that was sometimes attributed to him. When he went on to become President of the ...”

“... retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ‘way or manner of living’ in a world structured by technological and other systems. Cool exploits the element of ‘give’ or ‘slack’ in any such system. It is information designed to resist ...”

“... the people he writes about, usually men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former navy man, who wrote several hundred articles on Watergate for the Washington Post with his colleague Carl Bernstein. The two ...”

“... skipped along the way. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the road. Elsewhere on the record, Sid Vicious too defiled showbiz with his punk take on ‘My Way’, twisting Sinatra’s swagger into ...”

“... title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in part as sequel to ...”