“... of his life. 21 April. Persisting with the Duff Cooper diaries, which, though they’re more than frank about his innumerable liaisons, are utterly silent on more interesting topics, the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper ...”

“... of media-hype ... The pressure is to become a mulatto and house-nigger (Ariel) rather than a field-nigger (Caliban).’ In ‘Talking Black’, Henry Louis Gates, searching for a black critical language with which to read black texts, describes the same problem from a different point of view. How can we write or read the text of ‘Blackness’? What ...”

“... declared For such as serve not Rome – The terror, threats, and dread In market, hearth, and field – We know, when all is said, We perish if we yield. He could argue that he was being metaphorical, and alluding to the spirit of Irish nationalism, but his Ulster audience would connect it with the Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield – and, as he ...”

“... continue to exhibit an almost complete lack of self-consciousness about the methodology of their field, its ‘knowability’ and the purposes to which their knowledge (which can only consist of interpretation) may be put. This he attributes to two factors: the marginality, or ‘willed irrelevance’, of Islamic studies in relation to the general ...”

“... to recognise that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, the Western press is a far, far more fruitful field for disinformation stemming from the right than from the left. How much does all of this matter? Moon is fairly clearly mad, after all; the number of his followers is stagnant; and journalists like de Borchgrave seem unlikely ever to gain the full ...”

“... In fact he suggests that his book might be read as an attempt to ‘recover nearly the whole field for Longinus’, as opposed to the dominant critical tradition descending from Aristotle to the present-day formalists. The Longinan Sublime becomes a touchstone, for Fry, of that willingness to entertain doubts and perplexities which formalism vainly ...”

“... the Sun, or without any atoms, or with just the simplest atoms and no chemistry. Arguments in this field go well beyond the claim that life couldn’t have evolved without carbon, a claim sometimes thought unimaginative, although Rees finds it interesting. Marginally different knob positions would have led to a mainly carbon-free universe (or huge cosmic ...”

“... any injury is conceptualised as a debt, and every punishment understood as a payment. Hence the field of suffering is pervasively economised, and the contract becomes the salient model for human exchange. According to Nietzsche, all manner of injury is now modelled on the creditor-debtor relation. As injury comes to be conceived as payment in default, the ...”

“... rollicking Irish Catholic clan, athletic, photogenic and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf ...”

“... them all at once one night, in the hair, on your bag, up and down your dress?’ Satirists had a field day with her. ‘Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne as they do in France?’ she suggested in all seriousness. ‘Or pat her face gently with cream before she goes to bed, as they do in England?’ S.J. Perelman considered the ...”

“... Lady’ of Hertford fell silent on the subject, but when Johnson met her at the side of a cricket field and needled her, she told him that ‘no one could be against co-education when you see what lovely young girls we’ve got at Hertford.’ Warnock was also against euthanasia until her husband contracted a fatal lung disease, whereupon ‘she did a ...”

“... in the South. Whites were also lynched: Wobblies in the labour wars in the north-west in 1919; Leo Frank, a Jew wrongly convicted of murder, in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. But the story of African Americans constitutes a special case. No other post-slave society turned to terror lynching to maintain white racial dominance. At the memorial’s threshold is a ...”

“... somehow be reckoned with – by every critic concerned with the novel’s emergence, that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote ...”

“... exquisite art, he cannot fight the will of his wife or reverse the destruction she wreaks. Frank Kermode saw the tale as allegorical, ‘the life of art versus the life of evangelical conscience ending in the sacrifice of life’.James had heard from Edmund Gosse about the unsatisfactory marriage of John Addington Symonds, about Symonds’s ‘extreme ...”

“... the most respected financial writers in the country, and possibly the most elegant stylist in his field. While it is within the competence of the Board of the Observer to discuss the quality of the journalists and of their contributions to the paper, they have no right to dictate to the editor about whom he employs or how he uses their copy. Aware of ...”