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“... 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 ...”

“... Aesop was painted most likely in the late 1630s, as part of the decor of the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid. It would be good to know something of its original place in the building, or at least be sure that the Torre was its first destination, but as usual with Velázquez the court records are mute. (Even Las Meninas is a ...”

“... that poetry was always on the horizon for him. Carver preferred, indeed, to be called ‘poet and short-story writer – and occasional essayist’. Gallagher reprints his occasional essay ‘Some Prose on Poetry’, which tells how he came across a copy of the magazine Poetry in a house he visited while working as a delivery boy. The magazine’s owner let ...”

“... publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I’d be very pleased if they put ‘poet gad short-story writer – and occasional essayist’. In that order. KB: But in some ways your poems and stories are very similar. Your stories are in many ways like poems, and your poems usually tell stories. RC: True. Narrative poetry, poetry that has ...”

“... with speed and fluency. Formally, it’s unruly: at just under 300 pages, it’s one of those short books that reads as though it wants to be much longer, with oddly matched long and short bits, bald patches, messy ends. In particular, Mary’s arguments, excuses, circumventions concerning the unfortunate ...”

“... He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, which he left without a degree. He was for a short time an honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Rome, resigning in 1930. He had meanwhile fallen in love with a Viennese dancer, Tilly Losch, and married her in 1931. He divorced her (unusually for those days) in 1934. He had financed a season of ballet ...”

“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... The Trial in 1925, and followed it with The Castle (1926), America (1927) and a volume of short fragments and aphorisms, The Great Wall of China (1931). The first work of Kafka’s to be translated into English was The Castle, which the Muirs brought out in 1930. In the twenty years following his death, Kafka came to be known in Europe and America ...”

“... of course.McCarthy doesn’t consider Tallis’s posthumous reception, but she mentions that his Short Service remained in everyday use well into the era of Handel and Arne, helping to establish the 19th-century view of Tallis as the ‘father of English church music’. He is one of a truly tiny band of composers anywhere in Europe from the medieval and ...”

“... and again, that they don’t like a single person in the room. And the style? Always first person. Short, decisive sentences like doors slamming shut. Her time working in a bar served her well: Riley is constantly attuned to the moment when the glass is about to fly. In publishing speak, her books are ‘slim and devastating’, which is the sort of epithet ...”

“... the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain? Priest concluded that the judges should be sacked, the ceremony cancelled and the prize suspended for a year. The essay was a polemic ...”

“... the Byronic hero, Julian, more romantically alive on the page. Julian is distantly modelled on Sir Philip Sidney but is based more immediately on Vita’s ideal version of herself. Violet suggested a detailed description of Julian’s appearance. ‘“Julian was tall,” let us say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June ...”

“... of, this one is casual, even perfunctory. Long before I reached the end of what is a very long short book, I was at a loss to know why it had been written. Discussing the reasons why Burke, who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks ...”

“... minds to new kinds of non-traditional poetry, and it was confirmed with the appearance of Philip Henderson’s modern-spelling edition in 1931. This put him within reach of the general reader, and the general reader, eager for a change from the post-Romantic pieties of the Golden Treasury and newly trained to rejoice in the toughnesses of Donne and ...”