“... it.’ The objection was overcome by the offer of £2 above the box-office take – more, it has been estimated, than the normal yield of a full house. The play was duly performed. What was the play? Five descriptions of it survive from the Government’s interrogations, prosecutions and apologias in the wake of the rising. Though they are all ...”

“... who heard it from Clough himself. In his two autobiographies, Architect Errant (1971) and the even more errant Around the World in Ninety Years (1978), there are different versions, although in both, he denies that the incident ever occurred. Because of this ‘improving’, embroidering habit, some effort is required to perceive his earlier two careers as ...”

“... order is, and what a potential threat to order he is’; in the later work he felt able to be much more ‘ragged edged’, less subject to a punitive regime of verbal discipline. ‘No upright poem in its uptight English can seem to me quite free from limescale under the rim,’ he says here, embracing a less house-proud muse. The voice is still full of the ...”

“... Intentions are in one way more satisfying than works. They can grow and change without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and prospered ...”

“... like to feel the earth tremble and see the roof and walls of your home or school fall towards you? More to the point, in terms of survival: what happens next? It depends. Not just on the severity of the injury, but on who and where you are. Death in childbirth, once the leading killer of young women across the world, is now registered almost exclusively among ...”

“... had never much liked Mosley, consoled herself with the thought that ‘she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands.’ (Mosley was always known as ‘Tom’ just as Cynthia was known as ‘Cimmie’.) Mosley himself, in his autobiography, described his marriage to Cimmie as ‘an event in my life of outstanding happiness’ – which leaves open the ...”

“... Rostov, the finest product of the European education favoured by the Russian aristocracy for more than a century, visits the far from luxurious home of a distant relative. He is a nobleman living in the country with his serf ‘wife’, Anisya; he has, it seems, abandoned that superior attitude to the Russian ‘people’, the narod, that generally ...”

“... of staged resignations, is now a patchwork of very young MPs and very old ones, many of them doing more than one job. After 29 years in Parliament the 81-year-old Paul Flynn has made his front bench debut as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the ...”

“... of ‘gland’ to ‘gleam’. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. In The Gift, there is a more generalised debt to Bloom’s shopping. Godunov-Cherdynstev’s purchase of shoes – an epic of hypnotic banality retailed with rapt pedantry – is inconceivable without Joyce’s example: ‘A young woman in a black dress, with a shiny forehead and ...”

“... saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s. One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The snag is that when the person doing the marvelling goes on to do great things this can leave those with the commonplace ...”

“... for a subjugation during which about 10 per cent of the island’s population died and many more fled to Japan; after it was over, Northwest Youth members joined the island police. This was well before the Korean War, during which terrorist youth groups killed tens of thousands of civilians in North and South Korea. What was learned from declassified ...”

“... go, de Man’s was certainly unusual, and an account of his publications might seem to make it more so, for his first book, Blindness and Insight, appeared only in 1971, when he was 51, and even then, it is said, he published only because Yale drew the line at bookless professors. There were to be only two ...”

“... weren’t political, or that I wasn’t a political writer. I now know that there is nothing more political than the depoliticisation of the lives of women and children. This depoliticisation, effected on a wide scale, has now empowered a supposedly democratic state to force children to be born whom nobody, least of all the state itself, is equipped to ...”

“... Notebook; then split the undertaking in two, History and For Lizzie and Harriet; and added one more, new book of them, The Dolphin? What would happen to the resulting endless ‘litter of variants’ – and ‘litter’, pray, in what sense?! At what point would the career – the ‘one life, one writing’ – balance? (Perhaps the most striking way of ...”