“... away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ones of fire, damp and vermin – innovative libraries rapidly took root. They developed into two distinct forms, one private and one public.The modern private library or study, as Hui tells it, was devised ...”

“... novels of Sartre and Camus. Despite the echoes of Evelyn Waugh, of Beckett, of Larkin and Alan Bennett, these seem to me to be the real precursors of Mr Phillips. Lanchester’s new novel, in other words, is that hitherto unthinkable, almost absurd thing, a great English Existentialist novel. Nostalgic rather than loathing of Englishness, as The Debt ...”

“... of charm. ‘Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me,’ he wrote to Alan Schneider in 1956, ‘in fact I feel much more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.’ The occasion was the mortifying flop of the first American Godot, directed by ...”

“... review of Steps (1958), Graves sought poems which are ‘moon magical enough to walk off the page’ but was unable to ‘leave a poem alone when he had finished it’. Many poets combine the ululating shaman with the martinet who summons the howls of the shaman to order. But in few poets do those two voices shout at each other across the parade ground ...”

“... the feel of the Hobsbawm file, its heft. A PF is like a medical file: it starts with one flimsy page, and then, as the diagnostics proceed, its growth accompanies that of the disease it charts (another similarity is that the actual person becomes more and more abstracted). PF 211,764 weighs in at a thousand or so pages, collated chronologically as ...”

“... faith.’ Whether Harold Nicolson, inviting Osbert Sitwell, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell and Alan Pryce-Jones to contribute to its pages, saw the ‘new faith’ in the same light as Mosley isn’t quite clear. ‘Week by week,’ Mosley exclaimed on the front page, ‘we shall put before you new vistas into the ...”

“... As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the ...”

“... of reduction. In keeping with local custom, this important strategic decision was slipped into page 76 of the government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. Britain is replacing its Vanguard submarines with four bigger Dreadnought-class boats, which are due to arrive in the early 2030s. The government has also ...”

“... was nothing clearer in Riding’s mind than the disappearing thoughts which make it onto the page; the writing, as it exists for us, is really all there is or ever was. Either hypothesis can be read in a manner unflattering to the poet. We like our poets at least to tender us an illusion that they are giving us their all, and that the all they have to ...”

“... Ogedemgbe, the Oxford-educated daughter of a corrupt millionaire, begins the war as mistress to Alan Grey, our man in Lagos. But as the country descends into civil war, she becomes a soldier and then volunteers to cross the country to persuade the Biafran leader to lay down his arms. Her journey is horrific: she is gang-raped in front of her mother, she ...”

“... York City Bar Association (April 2004) and the American Bar Association (August 2004), and the 300-page Mikolashek report (July 2004), in which the army’s inspector general reported on detainee operations. It has been widely claimed, as it is here by Danner, that the establishment of separate inquiries reporting on bits and pieces of the Abu Ghraib affair as ...”

“... The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about duplication, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She confessed herself ‘a confirmed user of Whodunnits’.If reviews were more fun in the 1920s, that’s partly because mass culture was new and critics still believed they could cut through its excesses with sheer force of personality. There ...”

“... tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches’ they got while pulling the sets down. (Almost every page of My Name Is Barbra contains a detailed description of a meal.) In the fifth play of the season, she got a bit part as a flirtatious office worker. She was surprised to see the following day that she was the subject of a horny review in the local ...”

“... access to certain sites and certain subjects. Griffiths: When a user in China tries to load a web page, their ISP pings a list of forbidden URLs and types of content. If the page is not banned, the request is passed to an internet access point which handles routing traffic to servers all over China and around the ...”

“... was unaware that Jay Bybee and John Yoo, senior figures in the OLC, had already written a 50-page memo advising that harsher techniques could be used. However, in evidence given to the Senate Judiciary Committee, William Haynes, general counsel in the Department of Defense, studiously avoided admitting to having known of the OLC opinions before he asked ...”