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“... the novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the ...”

“... because the tensions and problems are simply too great for anyone. This is in part the theme of John Morrison’s efficient and often thoughtful biography, which sets out to show that, contrary to the view held (at least until recently) by many observers and politicians in the West, Yeltsin is ‘squarely in the democrats’ camp’. He reminds us that, as ...”

“... wonders what an editor not privy to Lawrence’s situation as he was writing made of all this. As John Worthen justly observes, ‘it is hard to imagine Lawrence writing like this before meeting Frieda or hearing Frieda talk.’ It is also hard to imagine any biographer telling the tale with more dispassionate sympathy and insight than Worthen does: his ...”

“... the capitals of Europe. When I took on these attitudes I was writing a book full of admiration for John Clare as a local poet, and I was learning to admire Constable as, principally, a local painter. But to be modern was to be metropolitan; and to be a ‘local’ anything in the 1960s, even for musicians in Liverpool, was to have missed the bus to London. So ...”

“... to have cost £80,000: the Whig spent £30,000 and still lost. The burden could be crippling. John Benett, MP for Wiltshire, was told by his brother in 1820: ‘The failure of the subscriptions at both the last elections has already thrown an overwhelming debt upon your property, and one that you will never see cleared as long as you live.’ And all for ...”

“... Clearly, the latter, though they are one to whom everyone is keen to pretend to defer. When John Reid, the health secretary, was discussing his reasons for not wanting to ban smoking in public places, he said he ‘worried about the unanimity of middle-class health professionals’ on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were ...”

“... Brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ (1736) ‘Hannah Osborne, Daughter of John Ranby’ (c.1747-50) detail of ‘Captain Thomas Coram’ (1740)PreviousNext In a thoughtful essay Lamb himself attacked the notion that what is most Hogarthian about Hogarth is what is most broadly comic, most boisterous, most fun. This, he claims, is ...”

“... God, here I am, hungover inside the little café near the markets, jittery, scribbling a babble of sentimental language in my purple notebook emotion container – no, buy some strawberries (fruit market) in the sun from the old Italian women who mutter ‘Thank you, signora, it’s a pleasure to serve even a rich and impious Anglo lady such as yourself, take another punnet, our brothers take precedence in our father’s will, but we’re content with that ...”

“... 3. Night Recall Station Road: typed in darkness Walwalinj silhouette blown sharp          flooded gum overhang a blackly sparkling canker, short shirted birdcall in damp,                     like running the car slow along Station Road to complete a second program, to rebus and whorl the Cross Road unlocking, road driven like an arched back under which all is hollow, the sound of the cavernous even where the ground is low and saline, she-oak huddle brushing silver magneto, sand and gravel dust kicked out of the rain paste, yes, like water rushing, exhumation of subterranean fractals, wheel ruts filled with rocks, wagon flashbacks, axle through thirteen separate land titles, striking wrong keys like totems not belonging to you, knowing after type is hot set there’s no going back, harvester still perched on rose quartz outcrop,                          tilted away from the sun of pinpointing shadow from fence to shaft,           glow through sustain plasticated Elders For Sale sign anaphoric round boundaries, sober post-restraint            up to salmon gum canopy, cavernous ride through cresting fallaways of ploughing or straight-in seeding, no mucking around, stubble misses like wire bristles so sharply upright, inevitable given data to start with, no accidental imply or implore, well water table hillock osmotically stonewalled or inclined, thick in the throat like spout or distended gullet,                     regurgitating, reflexing sheep picking over red dirt first green carpeting salutations against perfectly stacked hay world, samphire offshoots so sharp with finches still opposite thinning ‘rabbit bush’, Needlings backbone hanging there against gunshot, crossover anatomies hoeing desiccated structure against rain, in shed of pitch and tar, fire roll to circular breaks a holding-off of paranoid potentials,                     slick movements of nomadism, introduced weeds, burrs carted across property on ignorant hobnailed boots prised souls mis-striking wheat no-sprouted, lassitude of foliated salt patch hard on all families, sure, but high on Station Road they sell well at the expense of the low ...”

“... When statistics start horning in on our language, or the way we use it, the results are seldom quite what we’d be happy to hear. To be told that, day in, day out, we rely on some wretchedly skimpy proportion, a bare few thousand, of the uncommonly luxuriant word-hoard available to us anglophones, is chastening, leading us at best into sporadic efforts to stretch our working vocabularies by bringing into play delightful words we’ve always known but have somehow never got around to airing in public ...”

“... O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognise it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz I Scotlandwell All summer long, I waited for the night to drive out in the unexpected gold of beechwoods, and those lighted homesteads, set like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark, catching a glimpse, from the road, of huddled dogs and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard as one flesh, heads like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light; light from the houses television blue, a constant flicker, like the run of thought that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems to kindle us, and make us plausible: creatures of habit, ready to click into motion ...”

“... Emma, what’s wrong with America is (hilariously): ‘Not enough gun control.’ For Marvin – a John Bircher and addict of Rush Limbaugh slob conservatism – what’s wrong with America is ‘coloureds and hispanics’ (the Jews he can live with, since ‘they only sell drugs and prostitutes in the coloured districts’). Marvin built the best fall-out ...”

“... in a company of about 198,000,’ Edwardes writes: his secretary, his personal assistant and John McKay, the communications director, all of whom had moved across from Chloride with the boss. It was some time before we hacks cottoned on to the fact that McKay was not an industrial public relations man in the surprisingly thoughtful mould of the motor ...”

“... to marry her, including Leland Hayward, the agent and producer, and she had been nearly raped by John Barrymore, according to whom she had backed away against the wall of his dressing-room stammering: ‘No, no, my father doesn’t want me to have babies.’ Her mother, after all, apart from her social grandeur, was a serious and distinguished pioneer in the ...”

“... Dickens – who can tell what the unconscious of that great novelist may have got up to? – made John Jasper more in love with Edwin than he is with Rosa. I also much enjoyed the essay on Lady Morgan, known as ‘Glorvina’ and author of The Wild Irish Girl (the title is ironic – the girl was an animated and cultivated bluestocking), and its guess that ...”