“... in sacred groves, their totem plants being oak and mistletoe, the latter harvested by druids in white robes wielding golden sickles. Lucan combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired account of a grisly sacrificial wood, allegedly destroyed by Caesar in person, thereby overcoming his soldiers’ superstitious fears. Tacitus provides ...”

“... spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only on his very ...”

“... On page ten the lovers are discovered on a June afternoon: ‘the bed is king-sized, with a white padded headboard and matching white bedside cupboards.’ On page 14 it is the same afternoon, the bed is still king-size and the lovers are still in it: but the bedside tables are now mahogany and match the ...”

“... from ‘exterminating’, whether that referred to the buffalo or the Indian. Mitchell deals with William Cullen Bryant, Frederick Lee Olmsted (concerned with the creation of Central Park), John Muir (Yosemite), Thomas Cole (it is a ‘question of vast importance how far it is practicable to restore the garden we have wasted’), Lyman Draper (‘delving and ...”

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”

“... original characters. In among the sentences are the curses and commands of invading Teutons. In William Weaver’s translation there is a hint of Molesworth – the young cynic is just getting by in Latin culture, his canniness a substitute for learning. Yet in that greeting to the pygmies Eco has encoded a knowing little allusion. No doubt there were many ...”

“... That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions . . . But at the end of the day most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night ...”

“... answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had ...”

“... to olfactory life: soup buns full of crab meat and pork, drunken shrimp, radish-shred cakes, white jade tofu with spring onion and sesame oil. But the tea houses and dumpling vendors beloved by city workers are about to disappear as the restaurant system – once subsidised by the government – falls prey to high rents and the capitalist bottom ...”

“... of his necktie, all of it framed and contained by the black of his frock coat, offset by the white of his hands and face. We pick up, too, on the assertion: Fenton fills most of the available space, there is confidence in his composed features and concentrated gaze, in his spread legs, in the discernible bulge in his crotch. It is an advertisement for ...”

“... theatre’s small musty stage into an abattoir, dress the actors as butchers in blood-splattered white coats and hang ‘the criminals’ from their feet like cattle. This, Agim says, is the only way to illustrate the horrors of forty years of Enver Hoxha, the dictator who kept Albania in a Stalinist hell long after the rest of Eastern Europe had rejected ...”

“... in sunlight, lovelier than sunshine on cellophane the colors shine: popsicle orange and lemon-ice white, cotton-candy pink and mint-jelly green, cherry-soda red and raspberry-jello red. Cellophane crackles in the green-and-red-tinted dark.’ Here, the frankly nauseating means to evoke the object under scrutiny. With the novelist’s own (as it ...”

“... word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a friend/My heart is broken, it won’t ever mend/I ain’t much carin’/Just where I will end,’ she sang in ‘I Must Have ...”

“... a uniform rule of naturalisation’. Flexing this power in 1790, it invited ‘any free white person’ of ‘good character’ to naturalise. The tens of thousands of men, women and children dragged to North America by the triangular Atlantic trade were not included in this offer and those born of enslaved parents in the United States stood on ...”

“... are created unequal, the United States has attempted to come to terms with its longue durée of white supremacy only twice in its history. The first effort, made by black and white abolitionists in the period of nationalist expansion, and caught up in the conflict between slave and free labour modes of production, brought ...”