“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... a frequently bloody vengeance that will end the cycle but at a heavy cost. As the Freud-inspired David Quint has argued, this is the dilemma that confronts the central character of the Aeneid. The first part of Virgil’s epic portrays a retrogressive Aeneas, whose boat turns about, who seeks to found a simulacrum of Troy and who wishes for the death that ...”

“... found no human presence, and there is no archaeological record of pre-European colonisation. This may be one of the very few cases in the New World in which the word ‘discovery’ is not a misnomer. In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who ...”

“... My visit​ to Jamaica in May was shadowed by the likelihood of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian ...”

“... in order.’ Art remains ‘the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced’. You may think he should have been on the side of James, but he allowed his distaste for the pattern – and the style – to persuade him momentarily to accept a substitute for the force and beauty of art, something for which he had, on his own account, expressly ...”

“... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...”

“... act: citizens have a right to call on an elected office-holder to resign, just as he or she may choose to stay in office until defeated at the polls. The petition said nothing about the army, let alone calling on it to act in the matter. The same was true of the mobilisation for the 30 June demonstrations. Several well-known groups that had played key ...”

“... of violence and law enforcement, and sometimes of international respect. The public, by contrast, may find them less dreadful – often, in fact, less dreadful than the governments that are supposed to be serving and protecting their citizens. For centuries, pamphleteers have played with the fancy that the greatest thieves and murderers are not those dangling ...”

“... in 1939 the idea of Greece receded further, but what Collins calls Craxton’s ‘private war’ may have been the making of him. He went to the Central School and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly ...”

“... for political education and morale. With this Soviet Polish Army he fought his way to Berlin in May 1945. In June ownership of his division was transferred to Poland, under the Moscow-approved government in waiting of Bołeslaw Bierut, and it was as a member of what was now the Polish Internal Security Corps, the KBW, that Bauman went to Warsaw.Bauman’s ...”

“... for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close and fast. R. says, quite ...”

“... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...”

“... the non-racial project as a naive hoax, a dangerous illusion. Activists in the Congress tradition may argue about whether non-racialism is merely ‘a form that the struggle takes’ (Max Sisulu) or its essential content and objective. Julie Frederikse, a former Harare-based American journalist, firmly declares it an ‘unbreakable thread’. However, the ...”

“... counter-revolution the economic element carries more weight than the cultural one. Mrs Thatcher may not have succeeded in her declared aim of ‘killing socialism’, but some at least of her privatisation, de-regulation and demotion of union rights has come to stay. Indeed Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley are making it increasingly plain that many items of ...”

“... causes of the indifference English critics have on the whole maintained toward literary theory. It may even have served to justify indifference to what Northrop Frye called for, and called ‘a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organised, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main ...”