“... learned to read Western books; so was China, even though its unwieldy bulk left the national idea more amorphous. In Vietnam a national consciousness. Hodgkin writes, ‘was certainly emerging during the early medieval period’, or the tenth to 15th centuries, with roots much deeper. The country’s names for itself were oddly various, and ‘Viet ...”

“... swamp rat whose self-presentation is somewhere between Kris Kristofferson (in one of Peckinpah’s more unbuttoned ventures) and Gary Snyder. Neat prose to surf in short sharp bursts, each cross-cut segment with a hook in its tail. Impotent fantasies aimed against the ravages of developers and despoilers, incomers, fixers, quacks, swarthy New York hoods with ...”

“... lecture to the staff and patients at Bellevue, recounting his visits to Pueblo Indian settlements more than a quarter of a century earlier. He expounded on the scenes he had witnessed among the Hopi tribe in Arizona, through whose customs and dances he believed ‘American prehistory’ could be understood. Central to his analysis, though he did not observe ...”

“... your customers are telling you have their most immediate applications. But the authors are usually more ambitious than this and want to apply their notions beyond the confines of management studies – and in social policy. If businesses can use the wisdom of crowds to predict what people really want, to innovate new ways of providing it, and to test whether ...”

“... saying so at home it was as if I’d signed my own death warrant.TB was to blame for other more bizarre prohibitions. We were never allowed to wear open-necked shirts, for instance, lest the cold ‘go to your chest’. Sharing a bottle of pop with other boys was another deathtrap, as was not wearing a vest or drinking unaired water.TB was pretty well ...”

“... a commitment to paradigmatic notions of system and method that set it apart from other, more free-ranging styles of semiotic activity. It was the failure to achieve this ambition – or the problems thrown up in pursuit of it – that led to the widespread shift of direction signalled by French post-structuralism. It is simplifying matters to treat ...”

“... regardless of the relative risks. Violent threat is what they are familiar with, so they see it as more threatening; this is what you would expect of anyone who was forced to spend much of their time in the company of soldiers and police officers. But as well as being shaped by professional circumstances, individual attitudes to risk are also shaped by ...”

“... says Allen. ‘Sympathetic,’ huffs little Jack, as if ready to embrace death. A minute or so more of this, then Kerouac begins to read from his novel, while the host licks away at the keys. As he reads from the very end of his book he seems to see the corny world lift: ‘and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn ...”

“... Augusta, married, fathered at least two children, and separated again. He had exiled himself, more or less wilfully, from his ‘native shore’, fallen out of favour with his public, embarked on his greatest work, and begun his final liaison with an Italian countess. Murray was 33 when he accepted Childe Harold for publication. That poem, and the flurry ...”

“... grey’. In each example, Kipling’s language is patently not inert, but, like the harp of True Thomas, birls and brattles in Kipling’s hands. We think of Kipling as a special, borderline case, but he is not. Arnold memorably damn ed Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’ in his essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, a critical manoeuvre Eliot then used ...”

“... non-cognoscenti: ‘that Mistress Bare and Bald’, Coleridge enjoyed calling her in private, with more antipathy than inspiration. William McCarthy quotes the Table Talk anecdote early on in his compendious and admiring new biography of Barbauld, as though obliged to get it over with, and makes the suggestion that Barbauld had unwittingly revived ...”

“... human affairs, christened the scheme ‘Pantisocracy’. It sounds now like a comic interlude in a more serious sort of literary life; but many people (including Priestley) emigrated to America at around this time. Long before Coleridge arrived on his doorstep Southey had dreamed despondently about escaping England and starting afresh. ‘Is it not rather ...”

“... a Catholic, and seems never to have wavered in her faith, even visiting Lourdes in 1958 – though more, she insisted, as a pilgrim than a patient – and getting a special blessing from Pope Pius XII at a Sunday audience in Rome. She attended mass every morning, was delighted when friends such as Betty Hester were received into the faith, and thought long and ...”

“... genius, and such minds are privileged to think alike. Ackroyd himself makes this claim, if rather more tactfully than his publicity. Biographies, as he asserts in his opening and closing remarks, should be agents of ‘true knowledge’ and ‘real knowledge’ and this is gained by inspired intuition, mystical inwardness. Ackroyd, we apprehend, is close to ...”

“... the Serapis, commanded by Richard Pearson, and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Thomas Piercy – engaged the Americans, allowing the convoy to escape and shelter under Scarborough Castle.The battle raged for hours. Hundreds of people came out to watch. Cannon balls bounced off the cliffs. The Bonhomme Richard was slower than the ...”