“... spiked by his editor: ‘Your surmises both wild dangerous to President Wilson’s work for just peace.’Disenchanted with newspapers, Hecht moved to New York, where he hoped to become a real writer rather than a newspaperman. In his introduction to the new edition of A Child of the Century, David Denby compares him with ...”

“... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...”

“... was teasingly fond, or any of her other and more handsome suitors, she lived for a long time in peace and prosperity, governed her kingdom well, repelled its enemies and won the hearts and praise of most of her subjects. She has never really died. This is at once the stuff of fairytale, and it is not. Certainly no social worker today could be blamed for ...”

“... out of fear, even at the risk of nuclear war, and never fear to negotiate, even at the risk of peace. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Test Ban Treaty were twin feats of a single charisma. A thousand days later the President was dead in Dallas: the myth of Camelot had the martyrdom which would make it the American legend of our times. The atmosphere of ...”

“... to extol the heroism and patriotism of their soldiers and peasants. The spirit of War and Peace still hovers over them. Western accounts are more sober, and tend to see things from the French point of view, thanks to the massive amount of available French documentation. They emphasise Napoleon’s mistakes, the effects of winter and the travails of ...”

“... of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). When, at the emotional climax of Disgrace (1999), David Lurie embraces his daughter to comfort her following her gang rape by three men, she is described as ‘stiff as a pole’. Long after she knows his name, Beatriz insists on thinking of Witold as ‘the Pole’: it’s one of the ways she has of keeping him ...”

“... pursuit of wealth and power. Though Eden forfeited his premiership, his physical wellbeing and his peace of mind as a result of Suez, the one thing he did not sacrifice was his popularity with the British public. Where Blair’s approval ratings have steadily declined since the end of a war he won, Eden’s approval ratings steadily rose following a war he ...”

“... Worry Kyoko’ and ‘John, John’, Yoko’s contributions to the Plastic Ono Band’s Live Peace in Toronto 1969 – but you could always spin back to Rubber Soul or Revolver for a big family get-together, repatriating Lennon to the land from which he’d done a very noisy runner. ‘That . . . album with the drawing by Klaus Voorman on it,’ he ...”

“... with ... is old and decrepit and should go at once ... should be sent away to end his life in peace ... is quite unfit to be a Major-General ... is far too old and quite unfit to command ... is idle and has taken to drink ... is completely and utterly useless’. Sustained by treasure-trove of this sort, the reader will persist to the end. But he will ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...”

“... to 1953 and is set in rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. David, the hero-narrator, grows up an only child in redneck poverty. His shiftless father drifts from job to job, beats his wife and lets David get beaten up by young thugs his own age. The family are ostracised by respectable ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... male and female, self and other, the sexual and the political. Writing about Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath , Kathy Acker commented on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous homage to Acker by rewriting – or, rather, parodying – her work that same ...”

“... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...”

“... offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’. David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that ...”