“... Adult responsibilities are represented as almost unbelievably dull. In The Society of the Poem Jonathan Raban argued that a significant number of post-Movement poets accepted the daily rituals of the postwar world as nearly sufficient for the inner life: ‘The imprints of the same mass images, the same commuting ...”

“... for a naked lightbulb in the loo of a coffee-shop on Brick Lane – the height of reverse chic and Post-Modern marketing style. The sex stereotyping of Victorian retail still prevails, though in a different guise. Real men apparently won’t walk through racks of women’s clothes, so men’s gear has to be at the front of the shop or on the ground ...”

“... paedophilia, venereal disease and voyeurism’. The novel also lends itself wonderfully well to post-structuralism, since like a lot of Irish writing it is fascinated by writing. It has been argued that the typewriter is one of its leading characters, and the book is stuffed with documents, telegrams, title deeds and state-of-the-art reproductive technology ...”

“... upbringing of Hermsprong among the Nawdoessie, close to Fort Michillimackinac, the main trading post linking the eastern and western Great Lakes region, Bage gives evidence of familiarity with several of the principal contemporary accounts of Native Americans by European travellers. These covered a wide spectrum of opinion. In fiction, they ranged from the ...”

“... simply as a piece of Cold War kitsch, yet after decades of exile in the darkest corners of the post-Zapruder national imagination, it breathed with a forbidden vitality, reanimating familiar fears. Why didn’t the film feel safely trapped in history? Part of the answer is to do with its still shimmering quality. The film was an alchemical success: Frank ...”

“... of Heaven – it centres on a massacre of a herd of elephants by Waïtari, a deracinated would-be post-independence leader – gives Morel a chance to explain himself. (The Conradian speakers round the campfire have temporarily been forgotten.) We already know he’s a former member of the French Resistance who learned to love elephants in a German ...”

“... we’re just bluffing.’ What happened in October 2002 is that both Governments, according to Jonathan Pollack, a knowledgable specialist writing in the Naval War College Review, ‘opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes’, and so to unravel ‘close to a decade of painfully crafted diplomatic arrangements designed to prevent full-scale ...”

“... would be paid if they left town. This strategy failed; according to an account in the Washington Post, more than a hundred workers fought their way past the police, scuffling with the security forces and chanting: ‘There are no human rights here!’ To outside observers used to thinking of China as a repressive state, such a protest might seem ...”

“... he did his National Service before taking up a scholarship place at Cambridge. His first lecturing post was at the University of Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and ...”

“... monarchy; for the loyalists, his rebellion prefigured that of the American colonists. As Jonathan Odell described it in his satire, The American Times: What Michael to the first arch-rebel said, Would well rebuke the rebel army’s head; What Satan to th’ angelic Prince replied, Such are the words of Continental pride. Ellen White used Paradise ...”

“... the discourse of physics is somehow more in touch with reality than any other portion of culture. Post-Wittgensteinian Anglophone philosophy of language, of the sort found in Putnam, Davidson and Brandom, has collaborated with post-Kuhnian Anglophone philosophy of science, of the sort found in Latour, Hacking and Fine. The ...”

“... runs an early biographical note), geography has rarely been central to his work. The grubby, post-industrial milieu of his books is generic rather than specifically Scottish, and he shows little interest in identity politics. By contrast, You Have to Be Careful is preoccupied with place and nationhood. America is not just Kelman’s setting but – as is ...”

“... Apart from the editor’s obtrusive commentaries, this consists of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive ...”

“... such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in 1910, the year he ...”

“... The guarantees concerning privacy had literally to be iron-clad. On 1 January 1912, the General Post Office became to all intents and purposes the monopoly supplier of telephone services in the United Kingdom, and remained so until the creation of British Telecom in 1981. In 1912, phone boxes entered public service. They had thereafter to be ubiquitous, and ...”