“... programme. Médecins sans Frontières warned that ‘the air strikes, lack of aid and onset of winter will only magnify this catastrophe.’ Mass starvation was avoided by the concerted action of relief agencies when the air campaign abated in December 2001. But in September, when the decision was taken to attack, it wasn’t clear that this would be ...”

“... curve, migrating                     mouse-quivering water, mountain-driven winter water, in the high       tweed, stripping of fits mountains to run faster in its skin ... ‘Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman’ applies the same descriptive and mimetic skills to a bulldozer, an electric knife strop and ‘the space ...”

“... In the autumn of 1358, another ‘Great Company’ of English and Breton routiers under Robert Knolles invaded the rich Loire provinces, moving on into the Nivernais and the Auxerrois. ‘They brought the whole of the region under their control, ordering every village great or small to ransom itself and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every ...”

“... and emotionally immersed in the care and upbringing of his children. For example, in the winter of 1867 his eldest child, 15-year-old Tom, was ill yet again: ‘His coughing generally wakes me though he is in the next room, and if I hear him moaning I know that the pain in his side, which the cough brings on, is troublesome, and then I generally go ...”

“... There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the ...”

“... He writes about nights of singing and dancing in Donegal as described by the American writer Robert Bernen, who went to live there in the 1970s. ‘I am also moved by the image of those Donegal nights,’ Joyce writes, ‘because what I see is a life lived after dark, so that the senses and their place in remembering come into view again, literally so ...”

“... portrait for Literary Britain could manage no more than an unconvinced section of cottage wall. Winter roses, not notably sick, masked the heritage tag. Ackroyd’s yellow sands were not in evidence. A holiday camp to the right and a diminishing display of groynes to the left. A brown and curdling sea, backed by a line of deserted beach huts. I left the ...”

“... and then stopped again. Here, outside the city, there was still some snow on the ground’? (It is winter not Walter that has returned to the city.) It is the beauty of Musil’s German, at once sensuous and intellectually intense, that gives weight to this novel about weightlessness. It’s in the words, in the extraordinary metaphoric richness of the ...”

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

“... were never more needed in your life and probably never will be more needed than you are just this winter by the Fawn,’ Norcross wrote to her in September 1910. She would live with her mother for a further 37 years, playing ‘the role’, as Leavell puts it, ‘of indulgent Uncle to her adorable Bunny’.‘The Paper Nautilus’, Marianne’s most nearly ...”

“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”

“... hete, I dye.’ Watson’s version is sleeker, and closer to the original: ‘in summer freeze, in winter burn like fire.’ The English craze for Petrarch began to take hold in the 1530s, at the court of Henry VIII, where Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Wyatt were the ‘two chieftans’ of a ‘new company of courtly makers’. They had, the ...”

“... made them oddities in the Tory camp, émigrés from Britain like Alan Walters, Ian MacGregor and Robert Conquest. Her Jewish Cabinet members were by definition marginal men within the Tory Party – which had the useful extra twist that they would be properly grateful for their preferment and in all likelihood would never become rivals for the ...”

“... Rebellion of 1641 between them dominate the proximate causation of the English Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine ...”