“... Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition ...”

“... diverting if short-winded ideas pass by in a jogging continuum, and Siesta (1926) – a gentler, small-orchestral variant of this plan – are more original conceptions, and in some ways represent the most telling part of his legacy. But there is one totally spontaneous and unique creation, the work for which I think he will be chiefly ...”

“... as a pupil teacher, but so would many people if put in charge of a class when they were small, sensitive, female, and 14 years old. Officially failed teacher or not, she was the informal teacher of a ‘collier’s brat’ who became one of our century’s major writers. Meyers sets about Lydia as if the feminism of the past twenty years had never ...”

“... through it will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice ... Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 13, Stephen Mitchell’s translation Rilke was born into an ambitious but failing family in German-speaking Prague in 1875. His first given name was René, which he changed to Rainer when he met the extravagant Lou Andreas-Salomé. Before that he had unhappily ...”

“... was acknowledged while support for its claims was avoided. This wasn’t true in all quarters. A small number of economic historians in the US – many African or of African descent – maintained that, on the key issues, Williams was more right than wrong. Developments at the turn of this century led a larger group of historians, some just emerging from ...”

“... the crowd that was either coming from or walking towards the goddess. Bank clerks, schoolteachers, small businessmen, with their wives and children, the boys in shorts and the girls in frocks, looking like the pictures of children on the covers of exercise books, formed that tireless crowd. On the other side of the lane, after one had crossed the main ...”

“... Muscularity and flex are not much in evidence. Instead, Halberstam’s Washington seems like a small town racked by palace intrigue, grandstanding, back-stabbing, information hoarding, careerism, cronyism, bureaucratic inertia, lack of focus and supine inattention. Sometimes decision-makers are excessively cautious, at other times they are madly ...”

“... work will be so reduced that the chances of doing so both accurately and accessibly become very small. Most genuinely interesting philosophical ideas are challenging to communicate, and Parfit’s commitment to a particularly pure version of contemporary analytic philosophical methods does less than one might hope to diminish that challenge. His approach ...”

“... of his first commissions and then returning home to learn that a local shopkeeper has treated his small daughter, Peggy (Lucy Gallina), roughly. He grabs his daughter and drags her back to the shop, where he beats up the man, smashes the shop door and tramples on the man’s hand. The girl stands by, not exactly shocked but certainly horrified. Later she sees ...”

“... the point that Trial by Battle is not really a war novel at all. Much the same could be said of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Unlike Piper, Crane at the time had no first-hand experience of what he was writing about: he saw action as a war correspondent only after he had written the book. The point would be, though, that good works of fiction ...”

“... But all that has nothing whatever to do with this book.Although it appears in a series (edited by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe himself) in which the titles suggest all the latest Marxist, Feminist and Structuralist Paris fashions, the actual contents of this exercise, where they are comprehensible, seem to me to be distinctly old hat. Most of the essays ...”

“... the lives of Indians who never make it into the headlines or into the consciousness of the small ruling élite. Most of the characters in the book seem condemned to a life spent working to ensure that the élite can maintain their lifestyle. His first story is about his own domestic servant, Chandre, who belongs to a very low caste, and follows his ...”

“... scansion across the hammered metal of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers – a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily. And yet to criticise Walcott for being derivative, or for his showmanship, is both small and mean-minded. (‘Fear of imitation obsesses minor poets,’ Walcott has written, and not ...”

“... and a poet. She tells the story of how she came to write the book, with the help of the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, in her Introduction. Gould, for his part, does some contentious stage-setting in his Foreword, where, with the apparent aim of encouraging respect for the ‘important’, ‘influential’ and even ‘beautiful’ theory of preformation, he ...”

“... instance, that one with the tall, ornate iron gates and a watchman dozing on a stool … or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through the window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorising a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself – why did these houses seem to ...”