“... year. Stretching out. In one of his poems – later echoed by Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy – Charles Bukowski complains about the terror behind the thought of tying one’s shoes every morning, of brushing one’s teeth. The AA meeting room in this defeated old church stank of that terror. I took my 24 coin, the red one, plastic, out of my pocket, and ...”

“... hard and not hard enough to advertise itself by means of manifesto and provocation – could not hope to avoid accusations of gimmickry. The doctrine of ostranenie or defamiliarisation put forward in the 1920s by the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky sought to pre-empt such accusations by insisting that the work of art should, by contrast with the ...”

“... for some time now that Bligh was not the celluloid brute portrayed by tyrannical, lashing Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard, and Kennedy takes the process of rehabilitation a credible stage further, though his comparison of Bligh with Mother Teresa is a stage too far for me. His book amply demonstrates, to anyone who still believes in the Hollywood ...”

“... A Different Kind of War (1986), a revealing account of government propaganda. Donald Horowitz, the Charles Murphy Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, and Theo Hanf, the director of the Freiburg Bergstraesser Institut, are among the world’s leading comparative analysts of ethnic conflict. Horowitz in particular skilfully integrates a ...”

“... insidious thought, and one that might have sapped the writer’s morale) the cynical parents who hope to stave off their children’s urge to see the film by this paltry gesture, and thereby save themselves the trouble of queuing from half-way round the block? Of course the fact that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is being published in England invites a more ...”

“... happened in Spain and national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua; and the hope that in the Spanish experience we might find ‘the idealism and sacrifice so singularly absent from modern politics’. The idea that it was ‘the last great cause’ is echoed in the reminiscences of the international volunteers quoted in Richard ...”

“... than opinions, collective behaviour in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of discovering some historical laws of circumstantial determinism. In another, it has been resurrected as psychohistory, which seeks greater intellectual respectability by becoming evidentially more sensational, probing the intimate details of men’s inner ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... first appearance. As an essay in the history of ideas, it provides a wonderfully lucid account of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, makes more sense of Mussolini’s intellectual ambitions than most other works, and renders Hitler’s ambitions intelligible. But when Nolte attempts to explain Fascism as a ‘resistance to transcendence’, darkness tails ...”

“... Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting elected. Gladstone himself, whose eye for the main chance remained undimmed, would not have thought that an unhealthy motive. But there were deeper motives at work, too. In all three parties there was a dawning awareness that the dogmas they had ...”

“... Blair and his advisers might as well be Jordan, Fergie and Patsy Kensit flirting with Piers in the hope of getting more of the right kind or less of the wrong kind of coverage. They might as well be editors of tabloid newspapers offering perks to their mates and doom to their enemies. I had thought that the obsession with celebrity and PR was just the idleness ...”

“... in the sermon – perhaps what it had to say about libels against those in power – unsettled Charles I, who asked to see a text. The dean nervously scrutinised it for political error: ‘I have cribrated [sifted], and recribrated, and post-cribrated the Sermon,’ he declared anxiously, and his ‘recribrations’ (the neologism – which Stubbs ...”

“... more affluent West End. The ornate Fairfield offices designed by Honeyman and Keppie (the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh worked there at the time) now house a shipbuilding museum, but construction continues next door at BAE Systems, where Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. The yard has become a rallying point for protesters who claim BAE ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... is it something that we would wish to re-read?’ I squirmed. My rebuttal was resentful. But I hope I learned that in the matter of form and inspiration, the skilful engineering of form was by no means enough. In order to introduce Timothy Steele – the other poet whose company has deeply influenced me – I’d like to quote a brief poem from his first ...”