“... maybe a little reverb. For Banks, ideas were important and plots were paramount. His imaginative powers were extraordinary but no one would call him a prose stylist. Perhaps all the smart but simple teenage narrators were more than coincidence? Fifth, and frankly, there was little to distinguish between Banks the author and Banks the narrator, which meant ...”

“... stimulation of which provoked effects similar to those seen after direct injection of adrenaline. Thomas Elliott, a Cambridge physiologist, claimed in 1904 that sympathetic nerves produced adrenaline in tiny quantities over such target tissues as lungs, heart muscle and the walls of arteries. Adrenaline, it seemed, worked both as a hormone carried by the ...”

“... country for the inevitable war. During this time he was again drinking too much, often with Dylan Thomas, and occasionally more grandly with Eliot and John Hayward. He claimed that in these Marchmont years he was enjoying himself very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and Kathleen ...”

“... Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that be’ who are ‘not on the side of the British people, but instead serve the abstractions of “human rights”, “international law”, or other signals of middle-class virtue’. Kruger, an evangelical Christian, warned of ‘a new religion’ in ...”

“... of scholars. Alongside works such as Sophocles’ Trackers and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a sensation in the early years of the collection, Oxyrhynchus has yielded a student’s whiny letter to his father, legal petitions alleging everything from high crimes to petty acts of violence and endless accounts and receipts. Papyri have played a ...”

“... 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. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets ...”

“... a kind elder sister. Something of this feeling always remained; and even in the maturity of her powers, and in the enjoyment of increasing success, she would still speak of Cassandra as of one wiser and better than herself. In childhood, when the elder was sent to the school of a Mrs Latournelle in the Forbury at Reading, the younger went with her, not ...”

“... which some assert that we are under by reason of our Paramountcy, to rescue the subjects of native powers from what we call oppression, whether they ask for rescue or not; I regard it as nothing less than an ambitious and hypocritical humbug.’ This unvarnished tradition continued until the last days of the Raj. As late as 1928, Baldwin’s home secretary Sir ...”

“... character is also the only senior British politician who benefited directly from the crisis. Hugh Thomas, in The Suez Affair (1967), describes the behaviour of Eden’s chancellor, Harold Macmillan, as that of someone who derived ‘an almost aesthetic satisfaction from danger and risks’. It was Macmillan who did most to persuade Eden that an Anglo-French ...”

“... of explanation that Saussure raised into a high point of modern semiotic theory. Otherwise its powers will be exhausted in merely reproducing, at a ‘higher’ theoretical level, those same habits of thought engendered by capitalist market conditions.There is evidence elsewhere in this volume that semiotics can indeed be co-opted by interests (whether ...”

“... financial crisis, grapples with some of the complexities of the Calman Commission on extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament, and hosts a strategy session on the forthcoming local and European elections. Before he goes to bed, his speechwriter Kirsty McNeill sends him a copy of a poem to perk him up. It pays tribute to the American baseball star Ted ...”

“... by ‘the (Aldous) Huxleys’. She chauffeured a large black poodle across America for the (Thomas) Manns; she drank cocktails in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first ...”

“... position as the Government Critic, ‘the head of the literary police’. While not exercising the powers of Count Benkendorf in Russia, who was to control and paternalise the genius of Pushkin, Gifford and others like him were indeed powerful agents for the forces of reaction; and they were hypocrites too, because they never admitted what Hazlitt rightly ...”

“... Britten at 22, expressing opinions he never wholly gave up. Even some of those who recognised his powers would reproach him for his foreign ‘cleverness’ and urge him to behave more like an English composer. Much later he recorded Elgar’s ‘Introduction and Allegro’, and The Dream of Gerontius with Pears, so it might be argued that he allowed himself ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”