“... acquisitive and devotional.This isn’t a totally new style in academic speaking and writing; as David Lodge has famously shown, the performative style of showbiz and avant-garde theatre entered academic cultural life in the Eighties through the very conference circuit that Paglia claims to despise. Jane Gallop’s skirt made out of men’s ties, Terry ...”

“... to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes ...”

“... is the direct involvement of ministers. Between them, the Green Paper and this series of reviews may lead to decisions, within the year ahead, on the future of the Welfare State, or a large part of it. If we do not like what we get, that will be either because we do not share the ideas of the decision-makers of the day or because we do not share their views ...”

“... in Britain who belong to racial minorities do not share a single set of left-wing views: they may all be opposed to racism, but they have different ideas about how to overcome it. Joe Williams, a black councillor in Reading who has been a forthright campaigner for racial equality for many years, recently opposed a council proposal to spend money on ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... covertly in his Memoirs (1991), there’s a feeling that Larkin’s poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest ...”

“... on the pilot got up and running. ‘Shut off your cameras,’ said the arresting officer, which may be what Los Angeles police say now instead of reading people their Miranda Rights. But don’t worry: the cameras were back on soon enough to catch the family deploring the idea that Alexis was a thief. ‘Maybe this was just the universe sending a wake-up ...”

“... Shia and Christians was let out to Sunnis, ensuring that money kept coming in, and tax revenue may well have exceeded revenue generated from black market oil sales. IS was not weighed down by religious strictures about markets. On the contrary, the ‘Principles in Administration’ declare the need for ‘a comprehensive administration of collective ...”

“... Fatty food is tasty. Oils are rubbed into the skin for pleasure, relaxation and healing. They may also act as a medium to connect the body with a realm beyond the corporeal. The British monarch is anointed at the coronation to signify the sacred nature of monarchy and its place as part of a divine order. In the Catholic Church, Supreme Unction at the ...”

“... The narrator remembers his own flights from home, and fantasises about the dreams of freedom Dora may have had, ‘the illusion that the passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you’. But of course these are his thoughts, and he knows nothing of what Dora felt. He also knows, or ...”

“... more women had become authors: ‘Although the degree of control a husband exerted over his wife may not actually have been greater in the 18th century than during the early 17th century or the Restoration, the addition of the woman’s point of view on the subject … imparted to the discourse on marriage a new sense of crisis and individual ...”

“... to wry comic portraiture, and unitary in its messages. In an article about their adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Hemon writes that in the Wachowskis’ work ‘the forces of evil [inflict] misery on humans, who maintain their faith until they’re saved by an unexpected miracle.’ Elsewhere, he says that The Matrix Resurrections, for which ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... or the Interior Department, there would have been an audible growl of satisfaction. The Nazi David Duke, it doesn’t pay to forget, got a clear majority of the white vote in the gubernatorial race in Louisiana. And several of the new conservative intake of the Senate and House have made either electoral or political pacts with members of the militia ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”