“... various ways, and partly indeed by intimidation, as has already been suggested. But, as Sir James Stephen remarked in 1886, ‘a very small amount of shooting in the leg will effectively deter an immense mass of people from paying rents which they do not want to pay.’ This quotation, as Dr Townshend points out, focuses ...”

“... Port-au-Prince cinema. Nothing is left of him except a rusty dagger thrown into the harbour, and a small wet spot on the back of his seat. There are other richly entertaining episodes, including some rather blatantly steeped in literary pastiche. Buch even has a blown-up condom episode set in Weimar, as if Porterhouse Blue had been transported to the ...”

“... Bacon complains of biographical literature of his day. He says that actions both great and small, public and private, sho’d be so blended together as to secure that genuine nature and lively representation, which forms the peculiar excellence and use of biography.’ Fisher quotes these wise words of Jenner’s, but his book ignores them. Church ...”

“... whose white gestures filled a cab, And thought of neither then nor since. Also, to clasp them, the small, red-nailed hand Of no one I can place. Wait. No. Her name, her features Lie toppled underneath that year’s fashions ... The memory comes back not all at once but in pieces. The hand is fitted in at the end of a strangely constructed line that the words ...”

“... Cambridge) and Norwich, picks out for discussion the castle at Berkeley in Gloucestershire and the small town of Lichfield. The rest of Britain is treated in the same itinerary as Iceland and Finistère: this neatly ties together the place where the Scots, Norse and Celtic languages were known. Before making this journey around the North Sea, we have travelled ...”

“... the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Given the inflammatory nature of the topic, and the powerful sociopolitical questions it raises, it would pay a writer to tread gingerly here. Will ...”

“... but is now published in full for the first time, edited, introduced and ably annotated by Stephen Coan of the Natal Witness. It has the fascination that goes with anything written in 1914, even though the more spectacular events of Armageddon were slated for the adjacent continent. No one should be surprised to come across words now ruled ...”

“... firms dominated Iraq’s economic life. Riverboat freight on the Euphrates was monopolised by Stephen Lynch & Co. When the Chalabis set off for their frequent trips to Lebanon and elsewhere they travelled on the coaches of the Nairn Transport Company. Andrew Weir & Co, for whom Hadi Chalabi was the principal grain buyer, dominated the country’s barley ...”

“... Yet for all the compressed magic of this episode, the mystery is that this character and this small love-confusion should require the great background of the war, and those epic colours; that these convoluted amorous pursuits should depend on and find their place within such a magnificent tapestry. It is not so much that the film explores the relation of ...”

“... The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the Caribbean Echo, a small newspaper that served West Indians in Miami. Butler testified that Maharaj had paid the newspaper $400 to accuse the Moo Youngs of theft. The Moo Youngs then got the newspaper to publish a series of articles that claimed Maharaj was a ...”

“... was ‘no doubt fighting fires day and night’, Waugh reflected that ‘the armed forces cut a small figure. We are like wives reading letters from the trenches.’ The usual situation of wives was one of the many things breaking up for the duration. Macaulay for one was glad. ‘How to be useful though married’ is a question put but never satisfactorily ...”

“... married, was no secret; he broadcast the fact in frequent asides about fanciable young men or even small boys. But he had also begun to live a double life, sidelining his wife, Penelope Chetwode, a field marshal’s daughter (whom he nicknamed ‘Philth’) in favour of his mistress, the Hon. Elizabeth Cavendish, a duke’s sister (‘Phoeble’). He had met ...”

“... characterisation in negative qualities: the selfishness of Rosamund Vincy, the priggishness of Stephen Dedalus. Woloch looks at the question of how living persons get ‘rendered into literary form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists ...”

“... hordes of the hungry’. (This prevalent and, in my view, productive tendency is characterised by Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that ‘the normal is constructed on the shifting sands of the aberrant.’) Pleij’s contention (which is perhaps more relevant to Holland than to other parts of medieval Europe) is that great quantities of meat were consumed by ...”

“... In rejecting their defence of necessity the court transformed the law. The previous year Sir James Stephen had argued with perfect confidence that there was indeed such a defence: The old instance of the two drowning men on a plank large enough to support one only, and that of shipwrecked persons in a boat unable to carry them all, are the standing ...”