“... of Ambiguity, which became one of the founding books of modern literary criticism; Riding later took him to task for stealing the idea. Close reading later got itself a bad name after it was taken up by a group of poet-critics led by Graves and Riding’s one-time allies John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate to fight a turf ...”

“... 23.27). As the rift deepens, so does the anti-Jewish rhetoric, culminating in the gospel of John, which describes the Jews as descendants of the devil and murderers of Christ. To be a Christian means, in an important sense, not being a Jew. As Erasmus put it: ‘If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all Christian.’ These anti-Jewish ...”

“... camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt.’ judge halevi: Was he there? state prosecutor bar-or: He himself was in Theresienstadt. I simply hesitate to burden the court with material. This is an ...”

“... credits her grandfather with inspiring her to ‘make meaning in the world’ through words. She took a line from one of Keats’s letters as her credo: ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of the Imagination.’ At high school, di Prima and a group of friends (which included Audre Lorde) discovered the ...”

“... of her finest descriptive writing is about boxing, a sport she has watched since her father took her to Golden Gloves fights when she was a child. Oates sees the boxing ring as a site where spontaneity must emerge out of a tightly disciplined structure. Boxing, she points out, is as much about losing as winning. Even the best careers are ...”

“... seem to have consoled themselves in the interlude with women on his Jamaica estates, and three took wives after his death. As the one daughter who never married, Arabella Barrett remained longest and most intimately connected to the domestic world Elizabeth Barrett Browning had left behind. Before the flight to Italy, she had slept on a couch in her ...”

“... to the CIA and the State Department, which the hawks viewed as obstructive and hidebound. It even took in the senior leadership of the US military, especially the unimaginative and excessively risk-averse Joint Chiefs of Staff. All these were capable of impeding the greater assertiveness that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had yearned for well before the ...”

“... Alistair MacLeod is a Canadian of Scottish descent, and, like John McGahern who has written a foreword to his collected stories, an astute observer of a very specific local setting – Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; of its landscape and industry, its closed communities, quotidian tragedies and domestic disappointments ...”

“... pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie of speaking about evil at a well-fed and well-managed conference; this was well before we got to the unspeakability of evil ...”

“... of the Kremlin’s total Armed Forces of 5.3 million. Only 40 per cent of the Soviet troops took part in combat and fewer than 15,000 soldiers died during the ten years of war – compared with between 35,000 and 65,000 servicemen who died at home in circumstances ranging from suicide to hazing. Indeed, more than five times as many people in ...”

“... paper notes – so-called ‘Bradburys’ (the name of the Treasury official who signed them was John Bradbury) – to get more money into circulation. Now that war had been declared it was even less likely that the City’s banks would receive payment for prewar bills of exchange, so the Bank of England offered to take £120 million of unmarketable assets ...”

“... and pivoted grotesquely before at last tumbling free from their sockets as the grim separation took place at the soft centre of her, the tearing of Sarah’s muscle and cartilage and bone. Or perhaps it was only the basement door coming off its hinges, that made that awful cracking. Horror and grim laughter. Pete somehow still holds out hope that the ...”

“... family gone to the dogs, he failed at school, went into the navy, and then, not so rebelliously, took various jobs in the theatre provided for him by the father of a friend. He married two difficult women who drank and enjoyed their public fights until he didn’t any more, and then the most interesting thing happened to him: at 44 he met the 19-year-old ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... a dog, but not as receptive’, ‘dragged as companions into cots’; the dolls ‘themselves took no active part in these events,’ ‘letting themselves be dreamed’. Smith calls his subject Pygmalionism, or sometimes ‘agalmatophilia’, from a Greek word for ‘statue’, and his book is less interested in dolls as toys than it is in replica humans ...”