“... he wrote as if his modern French models had never existed. More than that, he wrote as if Victor Hugo had never existed. The tightly focused language which Eliot and Pound discovered and coveted in the French moderns was simply not what attracted Brennan. The proof is in his unshaken capacity to compose with the English equivalent of the full poncif ...”

“... like to hear the general being denigrated. As a Polish-educated gentleman he knew his way around Adam Mickiewicz and had, he said, ‘a physical need’ to read Conrad again and again. The first published version of A European Education depicts its resistance fighters as Polish irredentists, though in later editions they stand for more all-purpose ...”

“... subjected his children to a strict regime of supplementary classes in French at 6 a.m. and read Victor Hugo to them at night.Césaire began writing Return to My Native Land on holiday on Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast during the summer of 1935. He was 22. Earlier that year, he had published an essay in the journal L’Étudiant noir in which he railed ...”

“... the Writers’ Union where a sumptuous reception has been laid on. There, Jeremy introduces me to Adam Michnik. Why, I wonder, looking at his faintly grubby jeans, is Communist denim so distinctively different from capitalist denim? Why is it so insistently a work material which can never make the transition to leisure status? The truth of these ruminations ...”

“... it (and having done so, remained drunk or in bed throughout most of it), and the reason men like Victor Gerashchenko, the chairman of the State Bank, went along with it – they were desperate for money, and could see no way of getting it if the disintegration continued. It also explains the flaccid nature of the putsch. The men who carried it out did not ...”

“... of New Deal bureaucrats and lawmakers to requite ‘twenty years of treason’. Today, Congressman Adam Schiff of California – a quiet, lucid, methodical prosecutor in command of a flawless monotone – prophesies the destruction of American democracy at the hands of Putin. As in the 1850s, the change of clothes has gone both ways. Here is Patrick ...”

“... they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us overhear them ...”

“... for the loser, is sealed into the enduring qualities of the life that was; the price paid by the victor is the inevitable lifelong penalty of compromise and corruption.’ The spirit of history that moves in this poem, as in Hill at large, is one of noble defeat or neglect. The artistic figures he reveres are mostly the fallen – Swift, Blake, Clare, Isaac ...”

“... the spirit of Vienna, Ghervas cites the verdict of the tsar’s one-time Polish friend and adviser Adam Czartoryski: ‘that which, in the middle of the last century was considered only as the dream of a good man, perpetual peace, became the conception of one of the most powerful sovereigns of the continent,’ but ‘diplomacy corrupted this benign ...”

“... themselves. So-called normality can be the cover for a multitude of ‘sins’. The psychoanalyst Adam Limentani described the case of an apparently perfectly heterosexual ‘vagina man’ who during intercourse fantasised that he was himself being penetrated, which meant that to have sex was to be unfaithful to himself (he was fucking another woman), and ...”