“... policy of granting autonomy to Soviet republics. That Ukraine is now caught up in meddling by the Great Powers is not, Putin argues, a new phenomenon; something similar happened after the First World War. But through and beyond it all the unity of the ‘triune people’ persists.Early modernists are familiar with this sort of retrospective ...”

“... Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal. It is afflicted by the same soaring levels of poverty and workplace exploitation as the rest of the UK, but devolution has enabled the Scottish government, controlled by the SNP with the co-operation of the Scottish Greens, to try and ...”

“... to bring such things on.She already knew something of the family history, from a memory passed on by her own father. As a teenager, he had been woken in the middle of the night by his grandmother Betsy striking the wall that separated their rooms in the family holiday house with an iron, and shouting that he was ...”

“... of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead’. The number of witnesses was in fact immense: Leader calculates that 330 people from ...”

“... on the old) have taken their place. Most towns in Europe and North America are now served by only one newspaper, emphasising a trend towards monopoly of newspaper ownership and, with it, a return to the age of tycoon proprietorship which had begun to decline after the war. Most countries have seen a drop in newspaper readership (especially among ...”

“... write poetry without knowing, for example, about the proper use of runovers used to be considered as impertinent as it would be now to apply for a job as a truck driver without knowing how to shift gear.’ (Wearily, in a sanguine attempt not to be misunderstood, he ...”

“... between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ‘old’ New Critics like Wimsatt and Brooks. Of course there is a shift of technical idiom, from the homespun rhetorics of Ambiguity, Irony and Paradox to a post-Saussurian language of signifier and signified, text and intertext. But Riffaterre’s ...”

“... in the context of poets and writers. Religion and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature. Their communication seems to short-circuit it. The ...”

“... Spanish ships; and Hawkins had not a shot left in his locker to oppose them. ‘There should be an infinite quantity of powder and shot provided, and continually sent abroad; for this is the greatest and strongest combination, to my understanding, that ever was gathered in Christendom; therefore I wish it, of all hands, to ...”

“... of torture’ now known as the ‘chartered jet’ or ‘transcontinental sleeper’. Driven by some collective urge, we flock abroad and return two weeks later exhausted and ready for a holiday. Why post-industrial man should display such ritualised migratory behaviour already seems mysterious. And future archaeologists will find our tourist networks as ...”

“... between men and women, and added that the women ought really to marry each other, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? I forgot the remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls. It may not have been the same ...”

“... Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each time to seem more important to the status and success of the poems. It is the regal touch. Life Studies are Lowell studies, in the ...”

“... zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the ...”

“... Can there be literature after reunification? It strikes one as something of a science fictional question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War Two, and proceeded to divide the United States down the middle into two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation ...”

“... younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed his death she was to see her uncle become vastly famous, not as Marvell’s ‘best satirist and in the right vein’ or Shaftesbury’s ‘worthy’, but as a rake of the most rapacious and an infidel of blackest ...”