“... work. Philby achieved this by tipping the spy-catcher for the Western world, the CIA officer James Jesus Angleton, into clinical madness. Philby had help, of course. Alcohol, Angleton’s own personality, the very nature of spy-catching, the power of bureaucracies, and the appalling inefficiency of the CIA’s system of checks and controls, all ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly lyrical, should ...”

“... In October 1999, he presented his rescue plan in a rousing speech in Tokyo. As Hans Greimel and William Sposato show in Collision Course, Ghosn’s story was a chronicle of triumph and downfall foretold, and the foretelling could be heard right there in the grand ballroom of the Royal Park Hotel. ‘No sacred cows, no taboos, no constraints,’ Ghosn ...”

“... a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their ...”

“... came from all the maritime nations and the mixed crew often agreed very well: but in 1689 William III of England and Louis XIV of France were at war, and conceivably out of patriotism the British members of a privateer took the ship away from the French members, sailed her to Nevis and renamed her the Blessed ...”

“... them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those American poets – Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and others – whose work and moral example have been of importance to his own growth as a writer. The sentence quoted above, with its tinge of elegy and irony, occurs in the fourth and final chapter of Tomlinson’s new, brief book of ...”

“... a polemical framework which is all the more effective for being padded and partially covered. As William Gass pointed out in 1986 when this book was published to rapturous reviews in the United States, Home contains an assault on the ‘modern’ that conforms to type. It appeals to ‘us’, the long-suffering public, and it points the finger at ...”

“... The term ‘constitutional monarchy’ is bandied about as if it always meant the same thing. William of Orange was a constitutional monarch; so is Elizabeth II. The powers, rights, and obligations accruing to each are, of course, very different. Even written constitutions are subject to different interpretations at different times (as the extension of ...”

“... anguish, it is necessary for representation – i.e. language – to become anguished, as William Golding in Pincher Martin knew. Pi never stops being charming. More damaging to Pi’s integrity as a fictional character is that, having been established as a boy with an omnivorous spiritual hunger, he hardly ever thinks of God while at sea. There are ...”

“... Modern classicists have tended to focus on the Amazons in myth, as the subtitle of a 1984 book by William Blake Tyrrell – Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking – attests. But the balance had begun to swing back towards ethnography before Tyrrell’s work appeared. In the 1960s, archaeologists excavating the many kurgans, or burial mounds, that dot the ...”

“... inventory of population, livestock, crops and landholdings was conducted by Cromwell’s adviser William Petty after the conquest of Ireland, the better to plunder the country’s natural resources and divide the spoils among the conquerors. Cadastral surveys were instituted as a normal administrative routine by the British in India long before they came to ...”

“... no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and yarns? Professor James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply that it does. Dashiell Hammett, he writes, ‘challenges the easy distinctions between popular and high art, and the critical language that normally sustains those ...”

“... I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted (in England, at least) a slew of critical histories of his father, James VI and I, and his decadent court. Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James (1650), thanked God the Stuart family had been ruined. His assessment of ...”

“... to his studio with a snapshot of this young Galway woman who (he said) had eloped with his son James to Paris some eighteen years before. Mossy agreed to copy the photograph in oils, two feet by 18 inches, unframed, for the usual flat rate of five quid, ten bob down, the rest on delivery, asked the usual questions, colour of hair, auburn, colour of ...”

“... determination. It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge ...”