“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... the Laudians were capable of lining up with the supporters of popular merriment. They were by no means consistent in this, and on many occasions, the intensity of their concern with sacrilege led them in the other direction. In Sussex, the aspiring young cricketer who hit a ball through a church window found that Richard Montagu decided to prosecute him for ...”

“... can be avoided, Northern Ireland will continue to follow some single-market rules. This implicitly means putting in place what Boris Johnson had categorically ruled out: border checks. ‘We can do a deal without checks on the Irish border,’ he declared a year ago. The government has since acknowledged that there will be ‘minimal’ checks. Northern ...”

“... abstraction and rigidity, and there is a Catalan word for it: seny. This untranslatable term means, we are told, something like common sense, or the spirit of compromise, but it is also rendered as wisdom and intelligence, and Temma Kaplan associates it with solidarity. ‘The man of seny,’ we learn from a Catalan writer quoted by Hughes, ‘renounces ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... In​ scope and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western civilisation. For Said, the West’s representation of the Orient is an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialism. The Oriental is the Other against whom the West defines itself and whom it tries to dominate ...”

“... quality of the switch – almost had me tumbling. Which? Does it mean what it says or say what it means? Does it matter? Carroll says: ‘As she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t matter much which way she put it.’ Well, it does matter, I think, though I’m not totally sure. One seems to be a category (unfortunately) within the discipline of ...”

“... Valentin: You mean one sex inserted into another?Paul Eluard: As you know very well, to make love means to ejaculate.Albert Valentin: What does making love mean? Confused interruptionsAndré Thirion: At present, I love someone: no a priori representation. At other times, I had preferences.Yves Tanguy: I can make love in every way. I prefer ...”

“... alarming fissures, and the almost simultaneous attempts to impose the will of Parliament (by means of the Stamp Acts) and the will of the Church (in the shape of a colonial bishop) on the colonies were signs, not of the strength, but rather of the weakness, of British sovereignty in America. The colonists bemoaned these belated movements in a common ...”

“... monarchy and the imperial monarchy, then we can better discern the varied and interconnected means whereby the British throne has survived and adapted: bread and circuses, home and away. And of these new activities, changed identities and invented justifications, this charitable Crown has so successfully and so completely intruded itself into the ...”

“... work is brutalising and numbingly repetitive. It is especially indecent that the common-or-garden means of life are now at the mercy of profiteering. In Hertfordshire, it was reported in March, great numbers of people had to boil their water. The Three Valleys Water Company is now having to introduce expensive machinery to filter out pesticides. Ten years ...”

“... Marxism and its Leninist inversion value political debate and rhetoric only insofar as they are a means to their own ultimate withering away. As for the notion that ‘bourgeois humanist’ politics is simply a disguise for laissez-faire capitalism, J.G.A. Pocock and other historians have been pointing to abundant evidence that the ethos of commercial ...”

“... Moran, ‘the blind Dublin ballad-maker’ who died in 1846). All this attention to Gaelic arcana means we can’t help feeling the smoke of the féth fíada in our eyes from time to time, as in the entry for ‘Incantata”s ‘Thane of Calder’, Samuel Beckett. By concentrating on the Irish background to Gabriel’s surname in ‘The Dead’, Muldoon ...”

“... of the overall impact of Lourdes on French politics. To the extent that Lourdes was an effective means of mobilisation for the extreme Catholic Right – and Harris leaves very little doubt that it was extremely effective – it directly strengthened the forces of reactionary monarchism and anti-Semitism. In most cases, a secular observer ‘converted’ by ...”

“... in maleficium, the curse or spell that led to death or disease; but English villagers had other means of identifying witches. They believed that all witches were accompanied by familiars, demonic animals who fed on their blood by sucking on witches’ ‘teats’ (warts or skin growths, these were very different from the invisible stigma diaboli – patches ...”