“... seem so triumphantly vindicated. English literature is an academic discipline that has grown ever more numerous and ever more dispersed, now that so many of the world’s populations learn English as a second language. To add substantially to its methodologies or to its theoretical understanding is a challenge, but also a ...”

“... Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms. But the economy was not discussed. India has more than a third of the world’s poor. But poverty was not an issue. Congress’s secularism has been challenged by ‘Hindu fundamentalists’. But the Bharatiya Janata, the Party that’s been mounting the challenge, scarcely mentioned religion. The quarrels ...”

“... to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable. His name had become, as The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry put it in ...”

“... journey. The aura of Doing what comes naturally is quite different. There is, first of all, more variety of theme: in addition to the now familiar reader-oriented view of literary interpretation, there are essays on various aspects of theory of language (speech-act theory, irony, rhetoric), on legal theory (interpretation in the law, the concept of ...”

“... or accidental about the environmental depredations in the former Soviet Union. They are no more an aberrant accompaniment of socialism than the familiar evils of political oppression; they were not caused by Russian backwardness or bureaucratic error. Environmental catastrophe, he argues, is exactly what one should expect from an industrialised economy ...”

“... with graphs and tables which make dreary reading, but furnish a post-Orwellian credibility. More enlivening are the anecdotal plums in the academic pudding. In 1917 the novelist Beatrice Harraden (herself the author of a weepily genteel bestseller, Ships that Pass in the Night) surveyed the reading of wounded Tommies and discovered that their favourite ...”

“... chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter in hand. Proust ...”

“... them, and they are remembered with a kindly if slightly cynical smile.’ And this, I suppose, is more or less how they are thought of now. Edith’s dark vowels still find their way into anthologies. Osbert’s plush and ponderous five-volume autobiography is always likely to be named in surveys of books that are unjustly out of print. And Sacheverell still ...”

“... rushes transformed the world economy. In half a century 435 million ounces of gold were extracted, more than the total amount in circulation over the previous three thousand years. Increased supply strengthened the British Empire and the United States, setting off what Ngai calls ‘a new stage of capital accumulation’. Engels wrote to Marx in the 1850s that ...”

“... From left to right, Paul Sethe, Marion Dönhoff, Hans Zehrer. By the mid-1920s Germany had more than four thousand daily or weekly newspapers and another three thousand more specialised periodicals. Every town and city had its own papers, and some of them, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung or the Münchner Neueste ...”

“... in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The scepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals ...”

“... flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind you that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children ...”

“... on his condition. Every book he reviews turns out to be somehow pertinent to his lava-lump: Thomas Hardy suffered from unexplained pelvic pains too, as did Benito Mussolini. Writing an introduction to Vitaliano Brancati’s Il bell’Antonio, a novel about a gorgeous young man whose impotence has something to do with Italy’s descent into ...”

“... to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett. An explanation of sorts had already been offered by George Orwell. In ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946), he meditated on the apparent passing of the homely crime of murder as it was commonly ...”

“... took shape. This was a society of intimate relations between patrons and clients. Few were more able, or indeed luckier, than Wren. While his uncle was in the Tower for recalcitrant royalism, the young scholar nevertheless got support from several of Cromwell’s kinsmen. The Lord Protector burst into one dinner to offer a deal for the prisoner’s ...”