“... taxonomy, though anything but new, is stated with new clarity and order. Jargon from any source may be found in one of three forms: shop talk, show talk, and sales talk. The historical passage of a word or phrase from restricted exactitude, through metaphor to common language, and then, as jargon, to a death by evacuation of meaning will he shown by the ...”

“... while giving no quarter to the more paranoid forms of ethnic identity. The one, Rose comments, may just be the flipside of the other: it is those who have lost the minimal conditions for identity who yearn to be falsely secure. If the Jewish people have been romanticised by some Post-Modernists as that which eludes all fixed meaning, this is hardly the way ...”

“... The Lennoxlove arguments illustrated another traditional emphasis which, irreproachable in itself, may still have a distracting effect. This is the preoccupation with the post-1746 destruction of clannic culture and Gaelic tradition: the true meaning of the calamity then has to do with the fate of Gaeldom and ‘patriarchal society’, rather than that of ...”

“... all nobody to each other and everything to ourselves.’ Readers of David Plante’s novels may recognise this brand of solipsism, half stricken, half thrilled. It would be untrue to say that the conviction of solitariness goes untested in the course of the book, but by the end it has been vindicated at least as much as argued against. Richard’s early ...”

“... Implements in their Places (1977), this Clydeside proletarian reflected on language, on how one may utter words not to encompass known experience but to summon up experience not yet known and perhaps in the end unknowable. When in Malcolm Mooney’s Land he draws on Fridtjof Nansen’s diaries, he is building on Mallarmé, who was before him in seeing the ...”

“... definition of the ‘better sort’, to which national, as well as local, economic change may have contributed. Yet in Havering, as in the country, the clearest change seems to be, not a rise or fall in any class, but an increase in the numbers of gentry. Here Havering seems to caricature the national trend. In 1570 to 1590, there were 24 to 25 ...”

“... now proclaim you rad. Arise Sir Damien.’) Wicked (‘excellent, great, wonderful’), you may notice, has avoided becoming a snappy monosyllable. It is, we are told after the definition, ‘a reversal of meaning’, which seems obvious, but dictionaries have to do what dictionaries have to do. Its history is not entirely clear to the ...”

“... be something that each society discovers for itself. As a result, nobody just dies. The icy hand may descend everywhere and indiscriminately, but it does so in specific cultural and historical contexts. In all communities, a high degree of political and economic mediation invariably attends the event which is usually also intensely ritualised. The result, as ...”

“... them bare.’ The consequence is that, in these brief and distilled stories, the slightest gesture may have its effect. Nor can one predict where this effect will be made or the emphasis fall: it may be in some detail of the narrative, or equally in some fleeting moralising comment. How strange and altogether characteristic ...”

“... trials of faith they had endured. La Milagrosa, otherwise Amelia Goyra, died in childbirth on 3 May 1901. Her baby also perished and mother and child were buried side by side. When the coffin was subsequently opened, Señora Goyra was discovered cradling the infant in her arms, or so the story goes. At any rate, she is petitioned by Cubans in need of help ...”

“... would be more familiar with snakes than electric cables, but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t explain everything straightaway, or translate the Punjabi phrases he uses, or spell out the ...”

“... He travelled to St Croix and found a hut behind the Schimmelmanns’ house where the house slaves may have lived. He wonders if Hans Jonathan was conceived here, or in the fields of sugarcane, and if he was the result of rape. Palsson’s attention to place is part of his larger anthropological project of recalling the world in which Hans Jonathan lived, and ...”

“... the hard-drinking Danish Court in 1589-90, but his drinking was more commented on after 1603. This may reflect a cultural clash – Elizabeth I set an abstemious standard for her Court – but James may also have come to rely on drink more heavily in middle age. The almost insurmountable obstacle for anyone seeking to ...”

“... widespread currency among the main theorists in the humanities. Although a number of his concepts may still be knocking around – for example, Grenzsituation (a boundary or limit situation) – they were too often expressed in a turgid idiom, sprinkled with cumbersome neologisms, that betrays a sensibility far removed from ours. Concepts such as ‘The ...”

“... her way has nothing to do with her being a woman. Too bad, sweetie: you’ve got a problem, and it may have a legal remedy, but not because it’s a matter of sex discrimination; you don’t have this problem because you are a woman. If a man has or could have this same problem, your being female is merely coincidental to the situation in which you find ...”