“... From the mid-Twenties, increasingly disillusioned, he travelled in Spain and Italy, subsisting on small handouts from his family and the IRA. But in 1928, he was asked to help raise money in America for de Valera’s new Republican newspaper, the Irish Press. An unlikely fundraiser, O’Malley was not greatly enamoured of the traditional Irish-American ...”

“... a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Helen’s mother has a terminal illness – no wonder Helen is ‘having a rough time of it’. Mother and daughter alternate between considerateness and bickering, confrontation with what is happening and evasion of it. The ...”

“... Helen​ Frankenthaler is best known for her vivid, large-scale ‘soak-stain’ paintings, which initiated the colour field works of the so-called second generation Abstract Expressionists. She claimed that her visit to Jackson Pollock’s exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 changed her sense of what could be done with colour, space, line and movement – and convinced her of the value of allusiveness over narrative ...”

“... by a Japanese company and then, finally, Hollywood. All believed that they had exclusive rights. A small London company, Walberry Productions, which specialises in natural history films, had actually made two documentaries with the help of the KGB. The first, Comrade Philby, went out in May 1990. The second, Strange Neighbours, about the American spy ...”

“... were executed after 1939, including Iniesta’s father, who had been the socialist mayor of a small town; up to a million men, women and children were sent to jails and work camps, as Iniesta was, or suffered other forms of preventive detention and punishment. But still far less known outside Spain is the other side of that story: how Franco achieved this ...”

“... can console,’ concludes the title-poem of Sea Grapes (1976). ‘But not enough.’ Gros-Ilet, a small village on the St Lucian coast, is the main setting for Omeros, Walcott’s most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its ...”

“... But Larkin’s fiercely minimal 1955 version of it is. ‘Counting’ austerely allows itself only small words; small lines (of two beats or three); small units (couplets); small rhymes (monosyllables, all but one); invariant and insistent appearances of ...”

“... proper for the department to become proactive’.Appeal lawyers had battled for years with C3, a small department in the Home Office, which had the power to refer cases back to the Court of Appeal. The Irish cases highlighted the constant refusals and delays by the Home Office, which feared that a successful appeal might lead to criticism of the ...”

“... In​ 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt the world seesaw and walked away wretched. ‘I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford book ...”

“... novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in ...”

“... the smuggler on the satellite phone, one of the few accessories smugglers regularly supply to small boats. Based on their GPS position, the smuggler said, they had now left the Libyan Search and Rescue (SAR) zone and were in the Maltese or Italian zone.Since Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, Libya has been controlled by rival armed groups. In 2015, the UN ...”

“... especially in wartime, as an extraordinary occupation, which should not be scrutinised too hard. Helen Parr’s book is, in part, an attempt to describe how this change came about, through the history of a once infamous, now mythologised section of the army, the Parachute Regiment. The book is also a symptom of that change. Parr isn’t an ex-servicewoman or ...”

“... of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. The red-faced, jowly, small-eyed Professor von X is angry: he feels threatened in postwar, post-female-suffrage Britain by the loss of a feminine mirror in which to glimpse his own superiority. Woolf is angry too and her anger is similar to the anger that radiates from the work of ...”

“... book of American peregrinations, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Jonathan Raban fetches up amid the small, insular community of Guntersville, Alabama, where he meets a young motel-owner called Tim. Tim is writing a novel. Raban is consulted for a professional opinion of the work in progress, and with commendable grace he identifies the strengths of this driven ...”

“... Helen​ Phillips’s disconcerting new novel starts on a note of thrillerish urgency. Molly, at home alone with her small children, hears footsteps in the other room. She clasps them to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told ...”