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“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”

“... bonds of good fellowship in the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by ...”

“... house for the weekend, simply in order to tease them? But this is what Waugh heroically did to Mr Paul Moor. After Moor had been ushered over the threshold by Waugh’s butler (the date is 1949, when outside the pages of P.G. Wodehouse butlers were a virtually extinct species) he encountered the man he described as his ‘idol’. ‘After an elaborate ...”

“... religions while having in fact abandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It’s easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of ...”

“... Both​ Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work advocate things that seemed to have disappeared from thinking on the left sometime in the late 1960s: technological optimism, futurism, the making of programmes and the issuing of demands as opposed to bearing witness through protest ...”

“... suspect bit of European conceptualisation. Now universal emotions have returned with a vengeance. Paul Ekman led the charge, in parallel to but independently of Chomsky’s cognitive revolution. After doing clinical work on emotions and the body, and a stint as a US army psychologist, he travelled to New Guinea to see for himself, and made observations ...”

“... that her presence saved the lives of the other staff on several occasions. Norman Cigar and Paul Williams argue that war crimes prosecutions are necessary not simply for the well-rehearsed reasons – ending cultures of impunity, achieving ‘closure’, restoring faith in due process – but because they seek to establish individual responsibility ...”

“... beaten up in his cell by the Duncairn bobbies for leading a strikers’ demonstration: he lay with a strange mist boiling, blinding his eyes, not Ewan Tavendale at all any more but lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies all over the world, in Scotland, in England, in the torture-dens of the Nazis in Germany, in the torment-pits ...”

“... his fiction, charging at his narratives, as he put it, like a horseman at a fence unaware of what lay on the other side. Nevertheless, there remains almost a complete set of advance plans for a late novel, The way we live now, which suggests that in his later career, like his fellows, he too was a note-making novelist. Although he conforms to pattern in ...”

“... in the vast Sutherland empire, it never had the funds to embark on any major change. The reason lay in the economic effects of family structure. Though the Cromartie family did not have to carry the burden of large families to be set up in the world, they had just as expensive a load in a remarkably large number of relatively youthful dowagers who lived ...”

“... his wife took up a job in a military school. He later resurfaced – or so Bowers believes – as Paul G. Schmidt, who over the past couple of years has submitted stolen short stories to over a hundred different periodicals, including quite famous stories such as Ethan Canin’s ‘Emperor of the Air’, which Schmidt sent under his own name to the ...”

“... for my limited powers of apprehension and logical thought, my obtuse blindness to the answers that lay at hand. History shows that even the greatest scientists usually advance in small steps, because the development of new concepts causes them enormous difficulties. For example, in retrospect an experiment on the scattering of alpha-particles from a gold ...”

“... those of the day-before-yesterday’s uppers. Millionaires of the year 1900 didn’t go jogging or lay off the potatoes. They gorged themselves stupid on 12-course banquets, and showed off about it too. In similar fashion, Fussell himself points out that the splendidly dogmatic pseudo-scholarship with which prole sports-fans debate the finer points of the ...”

“... Persia east of Kirkuk and running down to Abadan on the Persian Gulf. All of the Arabian Peninsula lay within the territory, apart from Kuwait, then a British protectorate. That red line decided all the oil riches, and the oil wars, to come. In Mr Five Per Cent, Conlin sets out this history in sometimes dizzying detail; against it, the strains and oddities of ...”

“... even if for Kierkegaard it is the most important truth in the world. The cross of Christ, St Paul declares, is folly and scandal to both rationalistic Greeks and pious Jews. That nothing will flourish unless we remain faithful to the abject failure of Calvary is not what the world wants to hear. The Abraham of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling ...”