“... they are, with protests and complaints, converted into publicity. It’s something the media may have learnt from the old stockyards, in which none of the pig was wasted. My intention in this book was to be hard, to abandon rhetorical flourishes and keep myself to direct statement. I don’t think I’ve ever written a book with so many simple ...”

“... as it did a uniquely comprehensive monument to past greatness. Rhetoric, sentiment and panegyric may all have been eschewed (‘No flowers, by request,’ as Alfred Ainger put it), but it remained the DNB’s purpose ‘to do the state some service’ by ‘helping the present and future generations to realise more thoroughly than were otherwise possible the ...”

“... what we wanted them to express.’ This will remind many people (and not just correct speakers, it may be suggested) of a verbal experience which they have had – but only to the extent that pornography reminds us of sex. Using language well is never quite as good as this. Correct usage does not necessarily lead to satisfactory meaning, as Mr Simon’s own ...”

“... version, we go from a first stage when you must screw your cousins, to a second stage when you may not do so, and on to a final free-for-all when you do everybody. The present volume makes another major contribution to an overall theoretical issue in the discipline. There is a piquancy about this subject-matter of food. An outsider, at any rate if of ...”

“... look at all experience through the highly selective prism of its effect on the Jewish predicament may sometimes be useful in certain political and social spheres, but in historical scholarship it can only lead to grotesque absurdities. Exclusive emphasis on the role of the Jews in, say, the Reformation puts one in mind of those photographs of great events ...”

“... his penultimate chapter that he had occasionally got his chronology wrong)? And whatever view one may take on this, the vein of brutality and grotesquerie in Far Away and Long Ago becomes additionally fascinating in the light of Hudson’s anecdote. Whether he saw into his past, or only into his own nature, on that second day of illness, the reader is alerted ...”

“... the implications of his decision are interesting. The grand question ‘what is art for?’ may elicit less revealing answers than the simple one: ‘where shall we put it?’ It was not just the scale and seriousness of Rothko’s paintings that made the restaurant an unsuitable place to hang them, for when a real chapel was built in Texas for another ...”

“... the token tenantry of rustic characters, enigmatic, pragmatic, dogmatic, deeply enduring. Readers may detect an odour of Lawrence here and there, or catch a whiff of Cold Comfort Farm: but the scene is deepest Ireland. Onto this pastoral-mythical set Mr McGinley brings the machinery of a plot derived from the parable of the talents. On his 77th ...”

“... art history is under strong attack from those who deplore its lack of intellectual content, there may well be something to be gained from looking at the influence exerted by a man whose genuine passion for ideas only rarely met with that critical yet sensitive response which is always necessary if the subject of art history is indeed once again to become ...”

“... Schools of Social Science none of whose members believe in or practise functionalism. They may be wrong. If so, then someone must either do a better job on the formal logic of functionalist explanation, or else argue that it is not a type of discussion that lends itself to formalisation. The rest of Douglas’s book suggests the latter alternative. The ...”

“... of providing a future for their children. Of course my grandmother’s story and my research may not really contradict one another. Flatt may have first defended the acquisition of land, and later thought it was becoming excessive. But at least my anecdote demonstrates something relevant to Witi Ihimaera’s ...”

“... true to his promise that he would move there in October 1883 ‘in whatever condition the premises may be’. One party of casual passers-by, seeing workmen and open doors, took a look inside and were surprised to find Gilbert in residence. Contemporary photographs show dark, elaborate interiors in which dramatist and architect (Harold Peto took 7 Collingham ...”

“... could accept with equanimity the death at sea of several hundred sailors simply because – if I may borrow that phrase – they came from a country with which we were in dispute and which had a tradition of putting up too readily with dictatorial regimes. And if there are those who find it distasteful to talk in the same breath, as though that puts them on ...”

“... Drabble’s three women remain intelligent onlookers, well-meaning but detached. In part, this may be because the novelist is concerned to avoid the kinds of melodramatic resolution which are suggested by her closeness to the 19th-century novel tradition. Liz Headleand, though a psychotherapist, spends most of the novel putting off her need to enquire into ...”

“... implacable murderous intent who have haunted the Western imaginary over the past decade – which may in part explain the recent zombie resurgence. In Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Daniel Drezner reproduces some graphs plotting the sharp rise in zombie activity since the turn of the millennium.† It so happens that the generally accepted ...”