“... unworthy of them, a rather ordinary man eclipsed by a crew of fantastic heroes with supernatural powers: Orpheus who can out-sing the Sirens, the Boread brothers who can out-wing the Harpies with feathers discreetly attached to their hands and feet, Euphemus who can walk on water, Lynceus who can see underground. They take one look at Jason and elect ...”

“... only rhapsodic, that he is a practical writer as well as a vatic one, that he has not only superb powers of visual metaphor and visual concretion but an almost abstract delight in language. This last combination is rare: Shakespeare and Keats have it. Take, for example, a phrase from his celebrated story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911): a miner lies ...”

“... state in May, as he has threatened, he will fit the final piece into the jigsaw that the European powers made of the Eastern Arab world when Britain dismantled the Ottoman Empire. He will become, like his fellow mourners, a head of state. No longer a supplicant at their table, he can be a capo among capi. Is that what Arafat wanted all along, to sit at the ...”

“... comma counts, in that description); he, too, likes nothing better, while taking tea with Dr Richard Garnett, Principal Librarian at the British Museum, than brutally to crush the aspirations of any young person available for the purpose. Like Virginia Woolf, Ford asks where these abrupt and inexplicable furies came from. As Ford grew older, the beards ...”

“... whether CIA agents were above the law – ‘the king’s personal staff’, as the CIA director Richard Helms called them – or, like all other Americans, subject to the constitution. In the end the Church committee found no smoking assassins’ guns but, as Hersh says, the powers that be employed ‘lots of euphemisms ...”

“... living standards and collapse of life expectancy; humiliated the country by obeisance to foreign powers; destroyed the currency and ended in bankruptcy. By 1998, according to official statistics, GDP had fallen over a decade by some 45 per cent; the mortality rate had increased by 50 per cent; government revenues had nearly halved; the crime rate had ...”

“... see, if only we had looked. Two who drew the inevitable conclusions were the incoming President, Richard Nixon, elected on a promise of ‘peace with honour’ reminiscent of Mendès-France, and his devious National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Both had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, both had travelled widely (Nixon as Pepsi-Cola’s ...”

“... on Great Portland Street. Broadcasting House was a maze of stairwells, long corridors and unknown powers, a world within worlds that couldn’t quite decide whether it was a branch of the civil service or a theatrical den. Many of the men who worked there were getting their own way in the national interest, and the best (or worst) of them combined the secrecy ...”

“... This isn’t new: there was a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could ...”

“... the silty part of the Fens, and, since drained, some of the richest farmland in England), said the powers above him were unable to reconcile their desires for economic growth, on the one hand, and safety from water levels on the other. ‘You’ve got two diametrically opposed planning objectives,’ he told me. ‘You’ve got an objective around ...”

“... In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually ...”

“... our mental health at the thickets of TLAs – three-letter acronyms, in the coinage of the writer Richard Hamblyn – that accumulate like dental plaque. Such acronyms now pepper every document circulating in every institution, not just universities. Like the necromantic mirror of the Snow Queen, they swallow everything up and deaden it. The code conceals ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that would have cost the Conservative donor an estimated £45 million. A few weeks earlier, Desmond, the former owner of the Express newspapers, had ...”

“... by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.’ But whereas Kant views this fate as leading to illusion, antinomy and paralogism, Cavell sees it also as a source of something positive, a virtue of philosophical thought, even if it can degenerate into a vice. His ...”