“... whites protesting against court-mandated school desegregation. In 1974, a federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity Jr, had ordered the Boston school district to remedy its racial imbalance by sending students, usually by bus, to schools outside their racially homogeneous neighbourhoods. Boston’s whites – mostly Irish Catholic and fiercely turf-conscious ...”

“... causes left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the post-war British theatre was, as Arthur Miller has said, ‘hermetically sealed off from life’ – and from the American theatre. When Look Back in Anger was produced Miller had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass ...”

“... of their brother as a very modern man, in favour of science, not God. They are impressed and a little wary. He became rather disillusioned with science in later life and a bit less dogmatic. I wonder what Clara Collet would have made of the youthful Gissing’s lectures to his brother: ‘A girl’s education should be of a very general & liberal ...”

“... Genghis, ‘a father concerned for the well-being of his family’ (Ratchnevsky) was surely as little above ‘political considerations’ (Ratchnevsky again) as any European contemporary concerned with dynastic stability. Given the tenor of its predecessors, then, one cannot blame Ratchnevsky’s biography for bringing forward such qualities as simplicity ...”

“... of Brown to focus his magnum opus on a baby’s face. The model for the child was his own son, Arthur, born in 1856. Work became in part an elaborate memorial for the boy, who died before he was a year old. Brown, at a low point in his uncertain fortunes, had to borrow money to pay for his funeral. Throughout his long and laborious life, Brown remained a ...”

“... have existed if independence had not made possible an intermediate stage of industrial protection. Arthur Griffith, the apostle of Irish separatism in the first two decades of the century and the first leader of an independent Irish government, was surely right to have made a period of industrial protection a crucial plank of his nationalist platform. The ...”

“... anonymity’ and without ‘local allegiance’. They also acted, however, with little challenge from Hautefaye’s inhabitants. A priest, a pit sawyer and one or two tenant farmers showed courage as they tried to extricate the victim, but the complicit silence of other neighbours sealed Monéys’s fate. Mentioned only in passing by ...”

“... a Cabinet Minister. Su T’ung-p’o wrote this in the first century AD (the translation is by Arthur Waley). There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Space on mountains, however, is limited, and, for ordinary Chinese people, there have been other ways of surviving the harsh and inevitable conflicts of life: feng shui remains one of them. The feng shui ...”

“... signa efficientia.’ This, urges Professor Kelly, is absurd. Daily life demands from language little sublimity but a near-infinity of routine. Translation, seen as a whole, must reflect this distribution. But all too often ‘the literary theorist is not concerned with the ordinary uses of language; and the hermeneutic theorist has misinterpreted the ...”

“... The only difference I can find is that two private collectors, Frederick B. Adams and Richard Little Purdy, have extended to Hynes facilities they denied to Gibson, and that Hardy’s 32 charming and often witty drawings for Wessex Poems are now restored to the text. This makes this Oxford edition a very pretty book, if that’s what you’re looking ...”

“... by John Bayley which the paper will be publishing shortly: but I would like to diarise a little about this piece of Antipodean duality. Like other strange stories of the genre, it both embodies and attracts coincidence. A strong pang was felt when my eye travelled to page 15 and lit on the magic words: ‘When he first saw how enchanted I was by this ...”

“... him, still on his back, to cast an eye over his person, whereupon he finds that she has left a little memento of herself – a Freudian gift, hard, compact, warm, in its own way perfectly formed, a faecal offering smelling of fish and pasta (of tagliatelle marinara) – nestling among the soft hairs of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.’ The ...”

“... have, on the whole, confined their interests to a resolutely British Atlantic world, paying little or no attention to those other Atlantics – Iberian, French and Dutch – that need to be included if we are ever to arrive at an integrated history. Even so, this geographically restricted approach has yielded rich rewards. There is a greater awareness ...”

“... what was known as a ‘thrupenny upright’, along with more costly horizontal favours, felt little threat from male prostitutes who looked like men, since it was unlikely that punters attracted to them would fancy women as well. Relations between women sex workers and the ‘gaggles of Mary-Anns waggling their scrawny arses up and down the street’, as ...”

“... The​ Pillow Book was written in Japan more than a thousand years ago. Little is known about its author, Sei Shonagon, save for what can be deduced from the text itself. In 993, when she was in her late twenties, she joined the court of Empress Teishi. During the Heian period (794-1186), ‘empress’ was a flexible term: Teishi was merely the first among a number of consorts with that title, each with her own entourage, each competing to find favour with the emperor and bear a future sovereign ...”