“... man in Cairo: ‘family’, as Hillary Clinton put it. (The Clinton and Mubarak families have been close for years.) So long as he opened the economy to multinationals, achieved high growth rates and honoured his foreign policy commitments – allowing swift passage for US warships through the Suez Canal, interrogating radical Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as ...”

“... Ford said in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (spring 2001). The lyrics in Soft Sift often come close to being strayed sonnets. Like many modern poets, from Yeats to Ashbery, Ford writes poems that don’t keep to 14 lines, but that nonetheless feel like sonnets. Here is a typical 12-line example, from a sequence called ‘Inside’, embodying a terrified ...”

“... and coincidences that have influenced her life. Writing an autobiography is, she says, as close to a summing up, ‘a day of judgment’ when ‘the meaning of events is made clear,’ as she expects to come. In effect what she is doing, as she acknowledges, is trying to treat her own life in the way that she has treated fictional lives: to find a ...”

“... Although often assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of ...”

“... interpretative ends. The literary text, for Riffaterre, is an object of patient and erudite close-reading, a ‘monument’ whose utterly distinctive character the critic sets out to describe and explain. At bottom, there is not much difference between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ...”

“... Party as a whole. Their admirers believe they have an ‘ethos’ and an academic discipline close to those of the grammar schools. They are popular with many middle-class parents, who often get religion when they start thinking about their children’s education. But faith schools are inherently divisive: that is their function. And their admissions ...”

“... didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to close down (almost) indulgences and remission of sins, but the liveliness of the dead in their claims on us and their presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental ...”

“... Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my music, you worms?” ’ All three critics share the comforting belief that, au fond, the artist is great because he is morally ...”

“... next year, but she noticed that Blair didn’t seem very happy about it. He’d wanted to appoint Frank Field, who, Blair says in his memoir, A Journey, was ‘hugely persuasive on the big picture’, and told her that Field would ‘lead’ on welfare reform. Field told the civil servants he’d have her job within a year and they should take strategic ...”

“... date than used to be supposed. From the end of the Hannibalic Wars, when Rome was thrown into close contact with Greeks in Italy and in the Greek territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Roman upper classes took over the whole Greek apparatus for creating the amenities of life. Not only literature and art but ...”

“... is offered a £369 package trip to Memphis (‘Free Trip to Tupelo – Welcoming Elvis Party with Close Elvis Friends’); or the more distant economic possibility of a ‘life-size cold-cast bronze or copper statue of Elvis’ at £25,000. Pure white hand-polished busts of Elvis come in beautiful ‘marbelene’. Item G21 in the list is the Memorial Elvis ...”

“... official with the UN states that MacArthur told him: ‘No evidence has been found of any close connection between the Soviet Union and the North Korean aggression ... MacArthur thought that, if it had really inspired the North Korean aggression, the Soviet Union would not have abandoned the North Koreans so completely, giving them no assistance ...”

“... to wait for my father to answer ... he joyfully hastened to tell us that soon ... he would be a close neighbour of ours, in the Schwarzspanier Haus ... My father seldom got a chance to put a word in. The composer is suddenly there before us in all his garrulousness and good cheer. But who imagines Beethoven as garrulous? The poignancy of the situation ...”

“... written a lively, serviceable biography, but Chandler’s personal torments were made public in Frank McShane’s posthumously ‘authorised’ biography of 1975, and Hiney offers fundamentally the same account. The only child of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Raymond Chandler was raised in England after his father abandoned the family. He ...”

“... Her interpretive commentary is insightful but not overdetermining: it runs sympathetically close alongside her quotations of her subjects’ own expression of themselves. Leopardi for instance, was worn out – too blind to work, too exhausted and discouraged to see anyone, or to bolster up his courage by any fine attitude. ‘I am tired of life,’ he ...”