“... coercion appears unacceptable to New Labour. Many of the worst excesses of Britain’s managerial class could be curbed by amendments to the Companies Act. But, it seems, there are to be no such amendments because they would be coercive, and therefore offensive to those they sought to coerce. At present, the only people New Labour appears unafraid to offend ...”

“... sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for selling a pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield attacking the war with France and the corruptions of Pitt’s Government. An excellent life of Johnson, by Gerald Tyson, was published in 1979; since then, research in the cultural and political history of the late 18th century, and more specifically in the book trade, has ...”

“... outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for ...”

“... angles indebted to Hitchcock, set in a Germanic Europe devastated by environmental catastrophe or war. The jaded heroes roamed through wasteland, abandoned buildings, rubble, degraded suburbs, finding Gothic horrors: former Nazis dead in overflowing baths of blood, suicides dangling from ropes, bleeding whores, dying horses and abandoned children. In The ...”

“... to the setting: a well-to-do provincial French town in the years just preceding the Great War, with municipal meetings and busybody neighbours and the promise of much Bovary-like behaviour. Despite that promise, which is more than fulfilled, the novel’s opening pages nearly risk sending readers to sleep with long passages of dialogue that discuss ...”

“... not very fondly remembered. For the generation who were in their twenties during the Second World War, which included my parents and their friends, to say that someone ‘sat there like Queen Mary’ was to indicate that a terminal blight had been cast over the occasion. James Pope-Hennessy, born in 1916, belonged to that generation. He came from a ...”

“... during a long double session with her therapist (she tells her family that she’s at an exercise class) – include some of the best and strangest writing that Franzen has ever done. Outwardly she’s an exemplary pastor’s wife. She remembers the names of parishioners and gives ‘moderate, sensible, incremental’ advice. But Perry’s suffering reminds ...”

“... him – his education, sophistication and relative wealth – ceased to have any allure once the war began. If The Book of Blam isn’t straightforwardly a ‘Holocaust novel’, it’s nevertheless about the Holocaust, since what happened in Novi Sad between 1940 and 1945 radically altered everyone’s status and every relationship. Blam appears to be the ...”

“... on a fellowship, purportedly to write ‘a long, research-driven poem’ about the Spanish Civil War’s ‘literary legacy’, goes into the Prado and heads for Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. He has been standing in front of it every morning since he arrived in Madrid, but today he finds a man in his place, facing the painting – or ...”

“... counter-insurgencies like Malaya and Kenya, and only too pleased to be told that there was no Cold War reason for getting involved. Colonial governors thought they knew better, so would often disregard or cherry-pick MI5’s reports, frustrating the spooks, who were likely to take the blame. (Walton hints pretty broadly that he thinks something similar ...”

“... in the 1950s when it was discovered that she did not have a ‘suitable’ – that is, working-class or peasant – background.) Thanks to her rehabilitation, Magdushka (she is named only once in the novel) has recently traded her one-bedroom flat for a larger apartment. Desperate to spend as much time as possible on her writing, she decides to hire a ...”

“... Khartoum, is being destroyed in a fight to the death between two venal, brutal generals. This is a war of choice; allowing it to happen was a failure of international diplomacy. But if we look at the city’s 200-year history, the fighting shouldn’t be a surprise. Khartoum was founded on a command post built for the purposes of imperial robbery – and every ...”

“... in the British Museum, or the uniform of the Light Brigade is illustrated in the Imperial War Museum. Each item tells us something about its time and place, certainly not everything, but something. Nevertheless, they become a good deal more vivid and more informative when we are given a living context for the artefacts. The most exquisitely chipped ...”

“... the ‘Anglo-Vernacular’ version of the Upper School Certificate with flying colours (First Class), having attended courses in religious knowledge, ‘Vernacular’, English, arithmetic and historical geography. For Mdala, a chi-Yao speaker, Vernacular was the language of a conquered ethnic group, the Nyanja. Mdala left the mission in 1913 to work as a ...”

“... and Sans soleil (1982). La Jetée, his only fully fictional film, is set in post-World War Three Paris, and tells the story of a man troubled by two images. One is of a windswept woman standing on a pier; it is from his childhood, but he is unable to place it. The other is of a man dying on the same pier. The two images must be related but the man ...”