“... individual critics have rarely resisted the temptation to mock his identity-pangs. Paul Johnson wrote of him recently in the Sunday Times as ‘a fashionable figure’ with ‘modish problems of identity ... It is not clear to me,’ Johnson continued, ‘who, or what, the real Edward Said is.’ The implication is that ‘identity’ in the ...”

“... powder dry and mowed down an onslaught by massed dragoons. In great confusion, the government foot soldiers gave way before another Highland charge (the Appin Stewarts in front as usual). Flight and bloodthirsty pursuit began, watched by large crowds of spectators who sometimes had to skip out of the way of the fighting. As the publisher and writer Robert ...”

“... Robert could move, he didn’t just sit and play. He could do the shimmy. He could snake hip. His foot would move, he had rhythm.’ Johnson sang church songs, she says (‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’), along with folk songs (‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’) and pop songs (‘Did You Ever See a Dream Walking’, ‘Pennies ...”

“... along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a box at the Paris Opera during a performance of The Barber of Seville, and chose to throw away his major pieces one by one, finishing with the most elegant mate imaginable. In ...”

“... The conspirators emerged into the open to confront him. ‘The chief rebel came in and kicked my foot to wake me. In the frame of the door I could pick out three figures: all my sons, lined up for maximum solidarity.’ They inform him that they’ve decided he must rescind his retirement and recommit to the job. They tell him there’s a lot more success he ...”

“... and journalists. The first to arrive at the bar would be Sam Brewer, ‘a large man, about six foot three, who always dressed in a sober grey suit and waistcoat’. He would order a Gibson cocktail and sit at the bar reading the morning papers. Around 11, he would usually be joined – according to Aburish – by Bill Eveland, who worked undercover for the ...”

“... her own head, or in our time, or in the ancient world. Carson wrote in Economy of the Unlost that Paul Celan ‘uses language as if he were always translating’: we could say the same thing about her. Her translations usually sound like the rest of her poems, obtrusively contemporary but studiedly idiosyncratic, plainly weird (they may reflect their weird ...”

“... Gothic observation tower, ‘with its water-tank for use in the event of fire, became a hundred-foot chimney, funneling the flames’. ‘Great crowds gathered to see the spectacle,’ according to Nicholas Fogg in his history of Stratford: ‘At four o’clock in the afternoon the roof fell in, and by the following morning the building was a blackened ...”

“... reached epidemic proportions in France, but they were shared by many of Leiris’s contemporaries. Paul Nizan wrote in the same vein in Aden Arabie, an explosive polemic in which he ascribes his departure for the Middle East at the age of twenty to a disgust for the ‘molehill’ of Europe, ‘with its piles of clinker, and slag heaps from worked-out ...”

“... to inevitability.’ This doesn’t, I think, preclude the view offered fifty years ago by Paul Schroeder, a leading American diplomatic historian, that the statesmen and politicians involved felt themselves to be in the grip of forces beyond their control and that this perception influenced their actions. Nor does it mean that some – indeed most ...”

“... breasts – nipples – yolks) is crass and juvenile. Painter and Model shows a clothed Celia Paul with her brush pointing at the model’s penis, while her naked right foot squeezes paint out of a tube on the floor. This makes the visual double entendres in James Bond movies look sophisticated. Early on, he painted ...”

“... gave them the appearance of a battalion of women beggars. Ranks of stretcher-bearers with eight-foot spear-like poles added to the biblical quality of the scene. The volunteers flowed around my car like sheep. And then, reaching for the solace of his politics: ‘These are the men who feel that the eye of the world’s conscience is on them.’ Neugass ...”

“... the death of Jan Palach, the student who, on 16 January 1969, burned himself to death at the foot of the statue of the country’s patron saint, the good King Wenceslas, in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Soviet Union and three other countries of the Communist bloc. Now, for the first time in twenty years, ‘the ...”

“... Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly grossness of Merrymakers at Shrovetide plunges us straight into the world of the plays themselves. The analogy is suggested by Taylor in an ...”

“... redolent of a clergywear catalogue. Across the aisle, naked and rosy, dangles the largest baby foot I have ever seen. I text my friends a picture of it, to give them an idea of the infant’s proportions. King Baby, I call him, and steal looks at him throughout the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my ...”