“... 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 ...”

“... is perishable. Caesar’s precipitous rise and fall is a case in point. In When Caesar Was King, David Margolick’s admirable mission is to remind the reader of Caesar’s clout and to bring him back into the cultural discussion. To that end, he has thrown a wide net over the shows and the people who made them, although he doesn’t know quite what to make ...”

“... for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace. Fiction (since it is imaginary) has no real-life original context at all, and hermeneutically speaking can therefore circulate a lot more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... society, a civitas maxima, might be established and maintained. The construction of a perpetual peace on this scale would not be possible without treating the coarse timber of an all too tribal humanity. The rough edges of customs, and more painfully, of particular rites and beliefs, needed sanding down to a more compatible smoothness. The drive of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... business district. Some shouted: ‘Pigs go home.’ Others: ‘Fascist police – no justice, no peace.’ One black youth asked in an earnest, defiant tone: ‘As a concerned citizen of the beautiful city of Oakland, can you provide me with a valid reason for what took place the other night to that young man, for being shot in his back?’ He and several ...”

“... a collection of separate entities’ and ‘knows many things’, but who, while writing War and Peace, wanted – like the hedgehog – to know one big thing, to present a ‘vast, unitary whole’. Tolstoy’s sense of reality, Berlin argued, was ‘too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments ...”

“... eldest son, Bill, was dull; and of the other three boys, all of whom were highly intelligent, only David fulfilled his potential. Against his mother’s violent and continuing opposition her husband made him editor of the Astor-owned Observer, where he proved himself to be probably the best of all British post-Second World War editors. The other two, as well ...”

“... his subsequent decades in opposition. She accompanied him on official travels (to Paris for the peace negotiations, for example, and San Remo in 1920), headed up his private office after his fall in 1922, shared in planning his many opposition initiatives and campaigns, and prepared material for his multi-volume War Memoirs – a project that absorbed ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... he looked, Revel saw signs of democratic paralysis and impotence: in détente, in the spread of peace movements and anti-nuclear campaigns, in the widespread assumption that to be anti-communist was to be reactionary and an enemy of progress. Revel’s worries about democracy were widely shared in the 1970s and early 1980s. In February 1974 the head of the ...”

“... televised debate, epitomises his ambivalent relationship with the medium. In Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg argues that Nixon was the first American president pre-eminently concerned with the construction of his image.* Unlike Kennedy, his nemesis, Nixon was a self-made man; he didn’t have the benefit of an extremely wealthy and well-connected ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”