“... in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn, in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of ...”

“... of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how perception works. Rather, ‘in my opinion, “direct ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... he issued the reminder, Wolfowitz’s hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Bush term took a nosedive. Marshall wondered whether we are ‘trying to get retribution toward these countries by stiffing them on the contracts’, or ‘trying to come to some sort of agreement . . . to refinance and restructure Iraq’s mammoth foreign debt’? As if ...”

“... material of her art. She published nothing until she was in her thirties and even then, though she took immense trouble over her ‘little books’, she was modestly dismissive of them. The year before her death in 1943, when she was world-famous, she wrote to a friend that really she had done nothing: ‘I have just made stories to please myself because I ...”

“... been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... I believe that Greene was surprised by what he found in Yonda. Here disease rather than sin took precedence. ‘The priests are more concerned with engineering, electricity, navigation and the like, than with the life of man or God,’ Greene wrote in Congo Journal. Querry ‘has come seeking another form of love and is faced with electric turbines and ...”

“... as to throw away invoices; he assembled all the papers, went to court in a libel action and took on the eminent Sergeant Shee, to such effect that the judge stopped the trial, awarding him costs and a retraction of the libel. Jones emerged with his character intact, but with his newspaper career near its end. Late in 1859 he went bankrupt, with debts of ...”

“... even though he ‘read every pertinent document in every available archive’.But then, in 2011, John Tofik Karam, a young scholar working on the Arab diaspora in Brazil, published a piece in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Karam had come across the Paraguay programme while researching Arab migrations to South America. He was relieved to hear ...”

“... The constituency included Hull University, which had an active New Left led by academics such as John Saville, a historian and founder with E.P. Thompson of the New Reasoner, a forerunner to New Left Review. Many trade unionists and working-class Labour supporters, who Gott hoped would be responsive to his criticisms of Wilson’s leadership, also lived in ...”

“... Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist ...”

“... in the national revival that I saw taking place’. In 1972 a year’s Guggenheim fellowship took him to Beirut, where the PLO had set up headquarters after being forced out of Jordan. There he renewed his connection with a friend from Harvard, Hanna Mikhaïl, who had given up an academic career in the US to become a PLO cadre, taking the name Abu ...”

“... She believed in Stone’s talent from the beginning, read the novels as they were written, and took an active role in the creation of the later books, keeping track of characters, doing research, clarifying plotlines, and in numerous other small ways helping Stone to deliver his novels before his editors lost patience.‘Bob once said, Kesey goes for ...”

“... Revolution was gathering pace, as some of the 20th century’s most durable corporatist structures took shape in an increasingly authoritarian climate. The footage Eisenstein took of athletic parades, and of politicians and churchmen in particular, alarmed Sinclair, who later described it as ‘fascist in tone’. But he was ...”