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“... and the tension keeps slackening into comedy. A small band of criminals led by Clive Owen has held up a bank in lower Manhattan and taken some forty hostages. Are they after the diamonds? Money? The banker’s Nazi papers? Something else? There are plenty of plot twists, but the comedy is much better than the tension was ever going to be. A boy is playing ...”

“... Greater London Council, made the speculative proposal, in 1979, that the 1988 Olympics should be held at the Royal Victoria Dock in Silvertown, right alongside Bow Creek, the point of access to the Lower Lea, he was ridiculed by the man who succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... of the original Khoisan population. But Fifa dictates that World Cup semi-finals can’t be held in stadiums with fewer than 65,000 seats and it wasn’t possible to enlarge either of the two at Newlands or the Athlone stadium to that size. The city had also wanted originally to locate the stadium in a black or Coloured area, both in order to encourage ...”

“... essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be ...”

“... quotation from F.R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry where the way forward from Eliot is held to lie with Ronald Bottrall. To their credit, Eliot and Leavis did give some attention to MacDiarmid despite their political differences: but it was Edwin Muirrather than MacDiarmid who became canonised as a Faber Poet, and to understand his later poetry it ...”

“... was because he found the answer I have just quoted that he was able to act as he did. Ambition had held him back, not driven him on. He had to transcend it before he could make the leap which may yet turn out to have transformed British ...”

“... central paradoxes of Victorian Britain: namely, that while the highest office in the country was held by a woman, political life was almost exclusively a male preserve. She reminds us that Victoria was brought up in a domestic, female-dominated environment, but that after 1837 she was obliged to deal publicly with men, who were also very much better educated ...”

“... difficulties’? It had better be a lot, since a lot is looked for now. Those who long held de Man’s criticism in special esteem are in the position of having to offer him as a political or historical critic of some sort, because, just at the moment, that is the way to make a critic presentable. Here lies the interest of Romanticism and ...”

“... monarchy now exists for only one purpose: ‘our amusement’. And this has become a widely held view, in Britain, the United States, in Europe and throughout the Commonwealth. When Paul Johnson appears to be talking sense on a contemporary issue, and when the defence of the monarchy is left to such characters as Lords Rees-Mogg and St John of ...”

“... A third approach, in conscious and deliberate opposition to this shared rural sentimentality, held out the alternative prospect of a glittering, metallic future, dominated by machines, scientists and technocrats, most famously and prolifically articulated in the novels of H.G. Wells. It is in this fertile, Fin-de-Siècle context of confused and competing ...”

“... things will come, my dear. Let you dream of this.’ The once standard mythology of gay history held that Forster’s happier year arrived in 1969. Lesbians and gay men have been able to look back in anger, or bemusement, on the dreary history of pre-Stonewall gay representations, which seem to have been divided into two chief modes, conservative-moralising ...”

“... case of the public response to the Iraq war, Surowiecki’s conditions seem pretty much to have held. These conditions are strikingly similar, whether Surowiecki knows it or not, to the ones set out by Rousseau in The Social Contract for determining if a people is capable of governing itself. Here is Surowiecki: If you ask a large enough group of ...”

“... had a wrestling match in the dark and I got the upper hand and I crushed this person’s trachea. Held him down while he died. And then got up. I beat and strangled someone to death in a tunnel, in the dark. But that wasn’t the only casualty. The other casualty was the civilised version of me.The five voices I have mentioned so far among the eighty in the ...”

“... actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first scene, with a kitten in his lap, the most benign and enchanting ...”