“... some great authority to forbid change in her childhood homeland. The flanks of Penmaen, the ‘Big Rock’, have been thoroughly quarried and the summit (with its ancient fort) has been sliced off. ‘Who was first permitted to start removing this major aspect of the landscape?’ Again, ‘there are high-rise flats on the shores of Anglesey. Who let them do ...”

“... in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of Brighton rock. Could all this add up to a vindication for those who thought that Tony Blair would become the first Labour leader in the Party’s history to move to the left once in power? Did Blair not promise in the last week of the election campaign that he would ‘be ...”

“... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...”

“... wisdom in this country. In recent years Attlee’s reputation in Britain has risen from near rock bottom to dizzy heights. As leader of the Labour Party for twenty years, Churchill’s deputy during the Second World War, and Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, Attlee had many claims to fame. But in his lifetime he was written off by the Westminster mafia ...”

“... knowledge of the material they were extracting and also pick up the warnings of danger that the rock could give. Mostly they had to work in near darkness, relying on touch and hearing rather than sight. Pits were increasingly dangerous places until in 1815 the Davy lamp enabled miners to have light without the risk of causing an explosion, and even then ...”

“... Summers’s vastly enjoyable and revealing book, we find J. Edgar Hoover’s lovely home in Rock Creek Park being done up at taxpayers’ expense, complete with ‘hand-crafted fruit bowl’ and ‘a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone.’ One ...”

“... the object’s ‘function in a given human environment’ that mattered. A story was ‘like a rock or a refrigerator’, Barthelme said, because he could imagine a reader approaching it, ‘tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within’; in other words, ‘reconstituting’ it ‘by his active participation’. Many of his ...”

“... a Promethean stealer of automotive fire, chained to his own inarticulate drives as one bound to a rock; a winged messenger-god in a Mercury; a naked Eros. In Campbell’s account of the legend, the last of these figures is rampant. Cassady appears here under the double aspect of danger and desire. The importance of his role, allowing the spectator Kerouac to ...”

“... sick and tired of? How do you remain the party of business and a party of the majority when, as David Rockefeller complained, ‘people are blaming business and the enterprise system for all the problems of our society’? How to finesse the passage of regulatory legislation in the areas of occupational health and safety, the environment and consumer ...”

“... Bye Bye’ by NSYNC. When shortly afterwards a demo of a song by the vastly successful rock band Metallica turned up on Napster, the industry finally roused itself to action. Conglomerates such as Universal spent much of the decade engaged in legal pursuit of bedroom file-sharers, many of whom were allowed to walk free by sympathetic juries. One of ...”

“... Most of these kids turned out to be runaways from Middle America who had flipped on too many Sgt Rock and Fantastic Four comic books. My favourite was a 16-year-old from Tennessee who called himself ‘Kid Blue’. When I last heard from him he was phoning (he said) from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where the CIA had kidnapped and were torturing ...”

“... it, and pressure going out from it – of certain American independent film-makers and un-American rock acts than it has of Chekhov. The suburban ennui is familiar from Todd Solondz. In fact, Solondz’s new film, Storytelling, is cut from the same cloth as The Corrections, filled with the same sense of altered usage and the uncanny images which flood the ...”

“... the city lively and cosmopolitan. Ida painted, using ‘an old man model’ who sat ‘like a rock’. They made friends. By the autumn she was pregnant and adapting her wardrobe. Adaline was asked for a ‘loose black lace evening blouse … with long sleeves but not transparent – & a little low neck cut round – and perhaps streamers down the ...”

“... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...”

“... back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are ...”