“... the same Greek letter might be represented by more than one glyph; that instead of syllabograms, short or unstressed vowels were often simply omitted; that L was often written for R (according to his phonetic alphabet Caesar was indiscriminately KEESRS or KEESLS), T for D, K for G and vice versa. It followed, then, that the phonetic hieroglyphic alphabet was ...”

“... came ubiquitous Perrier), and at least for the historically-initiated, water power: France was short of coal. There was a time, too, not all that long ago, when another aspect of French concern was expressed in the requirement to pay for water in the locked bathroom for which the key was always carefully kept locked away at the hotel or pension desk. A few ...”

“... brought an informed knowledge of history, the classics and the Bible to their reading of a short, isolated text. The teacher addressed an audience which was in possession of its own cultural history and which had a developed sense of memory to draw on and add to. Unfortunately, the emphasis given to the isolated text’s autonomous nature – its ...”

“... in which he becomes an unvalued disciple of his creative writing teacher, Morgan Ames, and his short stint at Balliol as a Rhodes scholar in which he does nothing but sink pints of bitter and have an unsatisfactory relationship with a girl called Eleanor – there is some enjoyable Anglophobia in this second half of the novel. At least he dodges ...”

“... On 2 October 1937​ , a short but enthusiastic review of a newly published novel called The Hobbit appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit was, the anonymous reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own ...”

“... Times building to confront a famous literary critic (and also to ask him for work), ends with a short epilogue, headed, as all the chapters are headed, with a year. The epilogue skips ahead to 1945. Kazin was in London, doing some quasi-journalistic work on the British war effort. The war, Kazin wrote, ‘was the first payment on the more accomplished ...”

“... to give up untrammelled power in England as he had by the loss of most of his French empire to Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bouvines the year before. The meadow had been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day – ‘Runny’ comes from the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the ...”

“... concept is itself built upon a prior foundation of Humanist attitudes and sympathies – in short, which explains which? It is a pity that Grosskurth does not use her breadth and clarity of understanding of Klein to attempt a more ambitious assessment. A number of Klein’s colleagues and friends were involved in other activities and milieux of which ...”

“... be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual. The funhouse (in British ...”

“... It doesn’t stop with the book titles, either: the chapter on Edna Longley in W.J. McCormack’s short and contentious study of Irish cultural debate requires us to attend to ‘the reaction from Ulster’, and sums it up thus: ‘Fighting or Writing?’ This humorously echoes the famous anti-Home Rule poster with its caption, ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster ...”

“... meat as it is produced in the modern farming system, however, is not so appealing. In Farmageddon, Philip Lymbery – chief executive of the charity Compassion in World Farming – suggests that mass market meat is leading to ‘the death of our countryside … and billions starving’. For two years Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott, political editor of the Sunday ...”

“... get up. ‘If this bag isn’t full in one minute, you’re all gonna get wasted,’ he said. In short order they’d filled it with $54,000 from the tills. There was a flurry of bills in the frenzy. One teller was hit in the face with a banded stack of fives. On his way out of the teller pit, the man rubbed the shoulder of one of the tellers to comfort her ...”

“... Sometimes it issued in wry self-irony, sometimes in sentimental sadness – the quality that Philip Larkin was noting when he said that MacNeice might have written the lyrics to ‘These Foolish Things’ – but never in self-pity, and never in confession. From first to last, his favourite pronoun was ‘he’ not ‘I’ – the Self observed, but ...”

“... all judges are drawn from the relatively small barristers’ profession. John Morison and Philip Leith, two Belfast academics, have had a brave go at penetrating and describing in sociological terms the business of advocacy in the United Kingdom – a country containing three separate jurisdictions and legal professions. The contrast between their ...”

“... All the unhurried day,’ Philip Larkin wrote, addressing a long-dead girl who had been drugged and raped in London, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ All that day, and many days more, no doubt. But then presumably, since the girl later talked calmly enough to Mayhew, the drawer gradually closed, the glint of the knives softened, and life continued ...”