“... the other half is killing. Many of the men of C Company die in the extended fight to capture a hill from the enemy, but those who reach the top proceed to kill, and kill rampantly, horribly. It is then, during the massacre of the defeated Japanese, that Train is moved to ask: ‘This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What ...”

“... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...”

“... poet’s words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance,’ Geoffrey Hill wrote in his book about the ‘circumstances of language’, The Enemy’s Country. Resistance is always a way of talking about agency and language and invention; it is a way of trying to sort out our determinisms from our freedoms, of determining where what ...”

“... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...”

“... the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...”

“... preferred today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... influence of Durkheim with its special emphasis on structures. Both Raymond Aron and more recently Paul Veyne admit the influence of the sociological methods of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber in underscoring the specificity of historical events. In De la Connaissance Historique H.-I. Marrou attacks the narrow concept of what constitutes historical ...”

“... spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop ...”

“... shape it for us. ‘Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill’: in these lines the beauty of the London morning is evoked and confirmed through a comparison with what it is not, and the speaker’s own situation comes to be seen as it would be if he were standing not in the city but in a more characteristically ...”

“... but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said – he didn’t ...”

“... under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I ...”

“... never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the appeal against the demolition of the chapel of the old Boys’ Home in Regent’s Park Road and the construction of some frightful block of flats. Church packed, people standing at the back, and though the audience is a bit sticky to start with ...”

“... change, resource depletion, the future of the planet and so on, which is more or less exactly what Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer hoped would happen when they first proposed it in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000. Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist; Stoermer, who died in 2012, was a freshwater ecologist. The nature of their work caused them to ...”

“... of it than some earlier cultures. The introduction of a female-centred pornography with Fanny Hill, the new ‘sex and sensibility’ standards of 18th-century marriage, the decrease in the age of marriage and first intercourse (plus, according to one reading of the demographic evidence, more of the latter performed without matrimonial intentions) over a ...”

“... theoretical disputes within the larger psychoanalytic community. ‘Some say they are of Paul, others of Apollos or Cephas.’ H.J. Home has testified to ‘the tendency of discussion to run into an impasse, as for example when Kleinian comment sharply questioned the phallic interpretation of clinical material which it felt patently referred to the ...”