“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”

“... argued that even the roi soleil did not always get his own way. Monarchs who wanted to throw their weight about remained as short of cash as ever. Even under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the greatest of mercantilists (as proponents of the new orthodoxy later came to be called), the government’s deficit went on rising. Mercantilism usually means cronyism. As soon ...”

“... mandated delegates, indirect representation and conference sovereignty. At every stage, the weight is thrown instead upon direct ballots of the whole membership, whether to elect officers, representatives and Parliamentary candidates, or to take important decisions about the structure of the Party. That the inclinations of the members run in this ...”

“... have her comeuppance. A little more than a third of the way she does: ‘75,000 tons – dead-weight – rushing through the fog at 50 feet a second, had hurled itself at an iceberg.’ (The real ship’s displacement tonnage was 52,310. The figure usually given – 46,000 – refers to its Gross Registered Tonnage, which is arrived at through a ...”

“... Company struck again. This time the book was called Innovation and written by a director called Richard Foster. With ‘change’ all around them, successful companies need to know more about innovation and the problem of limits. Here, then, is the story of the S-curve, the theory of the Attacker’s Advantage, and a necessary correction of Peters and ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... child? Leaving Carol, my 80-year-old mother and my daughter relatively secure in the cars, my son Richard and I plunged down the hill, going from hut to hut asking for the little girl. Directed ever further down we soon found ourselves accompanied – ‘surrounded’ does more justice to the tenseness of the situation – by a crowd of young men with ...”

“... lightly in a corner. I asked what it weighed, and was told: ‘Maybe three pounds.’ The dead weight of the leg, that extra forty pounds, was entirely due to its lack of the normal postural tone one has in even the most passive normal limb. ‘Have a look!’ said the caster. ‘They’ve done a beautiful job there.’ I raised myself on my elbow, and had ...”

“... a lack large enough to incite the putting-down of a book that has put down life. Bellow, quoting Richard Rorty, instances angrily the philosophical ambitions of a distractive culture, its mimicking of philosophical procedures. It seems highly unlikely that Ashbery was at issue here. But it has to be said that his work has achieved a height of estimation by ...”

“... with pink eyes To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks; Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell Which slew the tragic poet.The hyper-pink shepherdess represents the dainty femininity wished on the child by her aunt. The hat, however, suggests to the adult Aurora, by now a poet with an interest in ...”

“... One definition of a celebrity might be that they are the people required by us to bear the weight of the question: who are we meant to be performing to, or what are we doing when performing to an invisible audience? We should never assume that because one audience is visible, there isn’t an invisible one hidden but present too. Among other ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... such strand was weak and incomplete, strands from associated fields of research could carry the weight instead, allowing the story to clamber up towards a plateau of coherence. What height, then, had Lewis-Williams arrived at? Not actually at ‘an origin of image-making’, as one of the book’s chapter titles brashly claimed: he never fully told us why ...”

“... life of the mediatised book group: Oprah’s Book Club had just returned from a year’s break and Richard and Judy were about to launch a UK version. (It was also a good year for coffee: by 2003 there were 425 Starbucks branches in the UK, up from 50 in 1998.) Consumers across the Anglophone world faithfully bought books, nearly finished them and then joined ...”

“... on a bed; or rather, three legs, an arm, a hand, a lower back and some indeterminate muslin-weight clothing in the process of being peeled off. The triumph of the photograph is that it’s both explicit and mysterious, intimate yet almost abstract: how, you wonder, are its subjects entwined? Which way up are they? Are they men or women or one of ...”