“... film all work for or are users of Pause, an organisation for mothers whose children have been (or may yet be) removed from their care. We see them – the social workers, mothers and Cammock herself – taking part in a singing workshop that culminates in a co-written song. The camera seeks out backgrounds and fragments, drawn to hands and feet instead of ...”

“... I was young, but which seems strange and hard to understand now. I don’t know why that is. It may be to do with his belief in God. The website also has Turgenev’s letters, which were legion and often in French, though they’ve been translated into Russian here. There is one drawback. The Russian texts have no page numbers and you can’t mark where ...”

“... novice charmer to lead women into loss and loneliness for their spiritual betterment, so that they may surpass Héloïse in their outcries. Although, like the companion piece on Don Juan’s childhood, the poem isn’t altogether uncritical, it remains at best absurd, at worst repulsive. It is a poeticised rendering of the old idea that unhappiness is a more ...”

“... once wrote that for the novelist identification with a character sometimes ‘goes so far that one may dream his dream and not ones’s own’. In my most recently published novel I decided one or other of the central characters should experience or remember a significant dream in each of seven chapters. When I tried to invent these they seemed in some ...”

“... his mother’s desertion, when she followed her music-teacher lover from Ireland to England. This may be so, although orphans and changelings are also a mainstay of Gilbert and Sullivan, and of the popular Victorian theatre in general. Shaw was certainly sympathetic, but it seems to me that what he appreciated most was the theatrical quality of the situation ...”

“... breathed English literature from that day on. That girl was my mother, and here, now, am I ... It may be, a form of colonialism that no rebellion can mitigate, no treaty bring to an end.’ In a sense, then, Asyah is interesting as a type of cultural cross-breeding, deeply implicated in the Arabic language and in Moslem life, her close friends Egyptian. She ...”

“... fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous.   In fiction’s grip we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean we may simply float away from our heart’s desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem ...”

“... be a devastating blow at freedom of speech, a disgraceful manifestation of bigotry and fanaticism. May it never happen. Now some less dramatic thoughts about Mr Rushdie’s predicament. His situation is not unique. It is, sadly, shared by many others. His life has been threatened, he has been ‘sentenced to death’ – although the word ‘sentence’ has ...”

“... unaware of just how much like each other they actually are.’ No sycophant, then, no courtier, it may seem odd that he is so persistently fascinated by royalty. It is, of course, not an unusual taste, as the publication of Lady Longford’s entertaining scrapbook abundantly testifies.* She gives us, for example, the full story of the Daily Express’s scoop ...”

“... We may be that generation that sees Armageddon.Ronald Reagan, 1980 My brother, my bright twin, Prochorus, I think his bright future’s been wrecked. When we’ve both got our lives before us he’s gone and joined this weird sect. He sits in a cave with his guru, a batty old bugger called John and scribbles on scrolls stuff to scare you while the rabbi goes rabbiting on ...”

“... out of London. In his journal, written on the empty pages of an old bankbook, he notes that on 23 May 1826 he walked to school: ‘Old Monk drinks like a fish.’ At 14 he feels it is ‘high time for me to be learning some trade or profession’, and at 15 he is alone at his father’s deathbed, holding ‘the cold clammy hand’. At 16 he ships for ...”

“... with a quarrel that occurred when the war had been going on for years. To begin at the beginning may be thought a sensible and natural way of proceeding – the Red King’s advice to Alice is still quoted with approval; and Nuttall actually calls such beginnings ‘natural’, as opposed to ‘interventionist’ or ‘formal’. Yet our culture encourages ...”

“... as a partial rationalisation of the Loyalist Workers’ Strike which brought down the Executive in May 1974. That strike was directed against, and achieved the downfall of, the power-sharing Executive that had been formed by a majority of those elected democratically to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973. The failure to tackle the strike at the ...”

“... to believe that their love was not physical as well as spiritual, but Sox cites evidence that Ned may have cared more for the concept of homosexuality than for its actual practice. He certainly enjoyed talking about it in the abstract, engaging in long-winded discussions about the purity of ‘Uranian love’, to use his favourite term for it. He liked to ...”

“... died war-related deaths (by killing, disease, or starvation) during these dreadful years. This may be a bit high (Sir William Petty put the number at between a quarter and a third), but Carlton plausibly argues that even in England a higher percentage of the population died in the civil wars than died in Flanders during the First World War. Carlton’s ...”