“... over a hundred short stories, most of them in SF magazines. By dying in March, Dick missed the May premiere of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first movie made from his work. Twenty-six years on, eight more films have come out of Dick’s fiction, among them the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall (1990) and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report ...”

“... the belief that equality is worn away by accumulation and raw acquisition: a view that Hollande may have shared for a moment, but one that’s harder to take now than it was when Mitterrand left the Elysée in 1995. Growing inequality is one of the central preoccupations in Who is Charlie?, Emmanuel Todd’s short, polemical book about what is and isn’t ...”

“... probably because divorce in Italy didn’t become legal until 1970, by which time both parties may well have felt there was no point. The TV version of La Storia was broadcast in 1986 with Claudia Cardinale as Ida, and the exposure made the book, now with a less confrontational cover (a photo of a little boy), a bestseller a second time ...”

“... Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford agrees that ‘though they are world famous, they may disappoint modern readers. Some of them consist largely of complicated wordplay, and scarcely engage our feelings at all.’ Equally, he is enthusiastic about the things he loves: Donne, for instance, is celebrated as ‘the greatest English love poet’, and ...”

“... make a space for language; a painting’s semantics of juxtaposition and interval, the poet says, may trigger a kind of syntax no one has tried before; the all-at-onceness of the image is an incitement to prosody. Why then, conversely, are not paintings drawn from Paradise Lost or Marino Faliero driven by a similar effort at mimicry, or intimation at ...”

“... of whom? Of the executive, certainly; of the parties to the dispute; of external pressures which may distort judgment; of personal biases: and no doubt of more besides. The Universal Declaration on the Independence of Justice adopted in Montreal in 1983 asserts: ‘Judges individually shall be free, and it shall be their duty, to decide matters before them ...”

“... became in his flattery, the more Berenson resolved to hold his meaty embrace at bay. ‘He may turn out too animal, too overwhelmingly masculine, too Bohemian,’ he fretted: ‘he may expect me to drink and guzzle with him.’ Even at his most decorous and ingratiating, Hemingway gave off too much of the whiff of ...”

“... in his view of literary history: he held no overt thesis on the precise causes of that decline. He may have regretted that an independent peasantry (also Wordsworth’s desideratum) did not grow strong enough to survive the Industrial Revolution. But he relied less on social history than on his sense for the growth of an anti-word. The decline happened ...”

“... my part I believe that a man serves himself better by showing a respect for such moral taste as he may possess ... While a great deal is made of aesthetic sensibility and its refinements, we hear very little about moral sensibility. It is ignored; and the deep-seated spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart of our civilisation commonly passes without notice ...”

“... Star’ of their poetry, though Fenton’s minor masterpiece ‘A Vacant Possession’ may, and conceivably should, be what they strive to match. Reflexive, aleatory and cornucopian, the New Narrative deploys its fragmented and ramifying fictions to image the unpredictability of life, and its continuous shadowing by What Might Be. It seems, in ...”

“... in The Beauties and Furies. When they do not, something is up. These rancid, cancerous homes may provide a useful apprenticeship in the nature of tyranny (several times in The Man Who Loved Children Stead stresses that children have ‘no rights’ within the family): that is all. The only escape is a plunge into an exponential whirl of furnished ...”

“... and wears the same subdued colours, and continues in the same vein for 30 lines. Only a little may divide a poem of this type from Fleur Adcock’s ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’, or ‘Old Man Travelling’, but ‘the little more and how much it is.’ The great danger to poetry today is that these sort of flat sensitive apprehensions ...”

“... a less anxious president, to revoke the order in April 1953. In Hollywood the fear began on 8 May 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by its chairman, Parnell Thomas, and its chief investigator, Robert Stripling, ‘set up shop’ at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The first response by the industry to notice of an investigation ...”

“... of water that hit the town, according to a map published in the Asahi Shimbun on the anniversary, may have been only about 22 metres high. I say ‘only’, but that’s a wall of water the height of a seven-storey building, and because of the narrowness of the valley and the steepness of its walls it ran far inland, scouring everything it touched, turning a ...”

“... professional treatment. Whatever his feelings for his wife by this point – some commentators may have come to firmer conclusions than the evidence warrants – worry and guilt were substantial elements in the mix. And then there were the uncertainties arising from his irregular relations with the Muse. He had written practically no verse between mid-1915 ...”