“... trouble with The Silent Angel. Böll revised the novel twice, but Mittelhauve still hung back. It may have been that he did not believe his readers were quite ready to look at what Böll called ‘the generation which has “come home”, a generation which knows that there is no home for them on this earth’. Just possibly he thought the novel, moving ...”

“... no corruption in high places, freedom from war and crime’. Concern for individual lives? ‘We may have the best that is possible in the circumstances. There was wide support for setting up the Man Penal Settlement.’ But still he talks to the Council and the Warden, and is told by Xan that he desires the end but closes his eyes to the means. P.D. James ...”

“... of history. Readers who have never heard of him, or his controversial interpretation of Hegel, may be curious to know why in 1992 – the year when Sarajevo came back into the headlines, when Los Angeles burned, and the Earth was lost at Rio – Kojève should be hailed as the prophet of the hour. The origin of this year’s media hype for Fukuyama’s ...”

“... poets, but major critics too – Helen Vendler has accused Walcott of ventriloquism.) His genius may be intermittent and may have taken a long time to emerge – his best work doesn’t begin until 1973, with the publication of his fourth collection, the autobiographical Another Life – but most of his poems are well ...”

“... the husband who will inevitably succeed him, and so to live the rest of her life in happiness. He may not be as conscious as the author of Jehan de Saintré that the shortest way to a lover’s heart is through the gullet – he believes that feminine modesty and obedience will do much of the job – but the cookery section of his treatise probably did more ...”

“... stars as Michel’s imaginary interlocutor and ideal reader, antagonist and alter ego; his death may have precipitated Michel’s breakdown. But this promising idea is continually restated rather than developed, and has no significance beyond itself. The book created a manner all its own in the articulation of incompatible worlds and styles. The student’s ...”

“... has the feeling of having stumbled into an allegorical jigsaw: Constance, Vittorio, Matt, Clement, May. Some of the Englishness can be attributed to Hazzard’s interest in verse. ‘The Sack of Silence’ borrows its title from Auden, whose combination of rationality and originality with occasional compression makes him a sort of grand panjandrum to ...”

“... Notes’, treatises On Entrails and On Winds, a study of the spheres (details of which may inform his speech in Lucan) and a brontoscopic calendar, detailing what thunder would portend on any given day of the year. St Jerome later called Nigidius ‘a Pythagorean and a sorcerer’, and the occult turn of his intellectual pursuits and his habit of ...”

“... the New Deal and class struggle. Consumer society was put in its place.Marxism, whatever else it may be, is not a view of life. It seems to do best when it is grafted, often improbably, onto a deeper metaphysics – Messianic half-hopes, Hegelian negativity, existentialism, even a dazzled vestigial faith in poetry or music. What the graft was in Davis’s ...”

“... In May​ 2005, in the city of Andijan in eastern Uzbekistan, 23 local businessmen were on trial, accused of being Islamic extremists. There had been a peaceful protest outside the court building for the duration of the trial, but on 12 May the verdict was postponed. In the early hours of the following morning, armed supporters of the men stormed the prison where they were being held and took over the Hokimiat, the local government offices ...”

“... in the story and causal in the plot, but this seems to be too elementary to get us far, and we may begin to see why Shklovsky, Tomashevsky and other Russian Formalists thought they needed the distinction between fabula and siuzhet. The difference is clear enough (too clear) if we think of real-life stories and plots. The fabula is what happens sequentially ...”

“... their six children – all passengers on the Lusitania, which was sunk off the coast of Ireland in May 1915. Perhaps that loss made her feel she had no one to leave her jewels to, even though she had a younger son (my grandfather), another daughter-in-law (my grandmother) and a baby granddaughter (my mother). When the Lusitania was torpedoed, the British ...”

“... has supported such a long and large-scale emigration process.’ The story of these labourers may shed light on China, but to claim that it forms part of a century-long state project of emigration as overseas expansion is wrong-headed. The Chinese state’s domestic and international projects changed many times in the course of the 20th century, as did ...”

“... every opportunity and failing fully to seize it, becoming less convincing with every attempt. She may well win the face-off, but Salvini still has the power to pull the plug on her government by withdrawing the support of his 66 MPs and 29 senators (unless they ditch him as leader first; there were calls from senior members of the Lega for him to go the day ...”

“... trying hard to prioritise reviews for the most urgent cases. This means we may be unable to review your ID or it may take a long time.’ In other words: you’re almost certainly not important enough.Having not heard back from Instagram, I eventually decided to set up a new account, a fake one under ...”