“... to keep himself out of prison. An unlikely alliance brought Berlusconi to power in 1994. In the north he partnered with the secessionist Lega Nord, whose founder, Umberto Bossi, said that it was ‘the party of those seeking to continue the partisans’ struggle of liberation against the partitocracy. Never with the fascists!’ In the south he partnered ...”

“... Paul Foot has a shocking story to tell, the story of Colin Wallace. It is, quite literally, a story of gunpowder, treason and plot. The fact that Foot’s publishers have had to rush the book out in weeks in order to beat the deadline of the new Official Secrets Act, and have deliberately forsaken all advance publicity for fear of pre-emptive action against the book, says something rather disgraceful about the difficulty of getting a fair hearing in this country ...”

“... hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one or two other people. ‘Ach, Paul!’ he said, when shown a portrait of his brother. ‘That square jaw, those big teeth, I would know Paul anywhere!’ But was it Paul he recognised, or one or two of his features, on ...”

“... war in a Calabrian internment camp until they were liberated by the British Eighth Army and headed north with it as translators. By the time they had to earn a living in Texas, they had Italian and Serbo-Croat and colloquial English, in addition to very good school French, and Latin. This was my first sustained exposure to English. I remember being grumpy ...”

“... martyracts, papyri and, above all, the mass of inscriptions, especially those from Asia Minor and North Africa. All this is controlled by and collated with the latest academic discussions and archaeological discoveries. He gives scope to his own feelings and sensibilities, but not at the cost of obscuring facts or to the detriment of a critical judgment. All ...”

“... would clearly look on any evaluation as an impertinence – or mere ‘chitchat’, in the late Paul de Man’s intimidatory phrase. As for style, some contributors do the plain, teacherly thing, and stay out of sight; others are over-clever or too flamboyant by half – an especially ill-judged chapter is D.A. Miller’s on Balzac and Stendhal: ‘Body ...”

“... types: the Huichol are taciturn inhabitants of the high desert of the Sierra Madre Occidental in North-West Mexico, celebrated in anthropological literature for an annual journey to obtain the hallucinogenic peyote cactus for their shamanic rites, long in contact with and resistant to Christian influence; while the Panare are genial ...”

“... unhappily for Hexter, and not only, as our author claims, because of the work of Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller. I will go so far as to say that the idea of the Renaissance was big enough and strong enough to do without the rejuvenating serum administered to it, with the best of intentions, by these two excellent historians. In fact, it is economic ...”

“... confused or illusory. Kate Vaiden is just as firmly rooted in local reality – in this case, the North Carolina about which Reynolds Price has been writing for more than twenty years now. The name, at once plain and elusive, might have appealed to Henry James. The echoes of ‘maiden’ and ‘evading’ are particularly apposite, for despite starting her ...”

“... public sector. They are more geographically concentrated than at any time since Sharp’s day: in North and North-West London, and in English university towns. The once substantial Scottish readership, and that in Britain’s former colonies, have almost vanished. What remains is a shrunken core group, but one which is ...”

“... repression it met with, is, in retrospect, an extraordinary thing in itself. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Charlotta Bass, Claudia Jones and William Patterson in the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Panther Party connected the oppression of black America to people of colour around the globe, linking the internal struggle against racism in the US to ...”

“... LSD-fuelled trips of self-discovery, for Friern Hospital, a hulking Victorian mental asylum in a North London suburb, which was formerly known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. Friern had six miles of corridors, surfaced with bitumen, and a ward round was said to take five hours. ‘These are roadway distances,’ Busner thinks, ‘a hundred yards, a hundred ...”

“... of Westminster Abbey or There Will Be Blood? Even so, the author is not quite dead. It is true, as Paul Valéry pointed out, that many things are involved in the creation of a work of art besides an author; but this is to demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real life, it ...”

“... jokes were not only jokes. This book is not a satirical attack on the right-wing imagination in North and South America: it is a darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible. What is compelling about these portraits is not their plausibility, which is slender and intermittent, but their profusion and ...”

“... defence, tried to turn a defeat into a rhetorical victory, dressing up a humiliating ambush by the North Vietnamese army as an American triumph. The Washington press corps dutifully reported the official Pentagon version of events. A US navy captain called Mark Hill, who was working on a project for McNamara, eventually let Hersh in on the real, catastrophic ...”