“... that write the script. No social history ‘from below’ for him: ‘History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.’ The revolutions of the last two hundred years in the treatment of pathogenic bacteria and the production of antiviral vaccines have made death from infectious disease far ...”

“... The two halves changed shape, feeding and modifying each other.He first visited London as a small boy, in 1849, two years after the opening of the Dorchester to Southampton railway line. But the family’s relationship with the city went back to Hardy’s mother, who as a young servant in the household of the vicar of Stinsford had spent several months ...”

“... McChrystal, or the rules of engagement he applied in Afghanistan. His preference for deploying small covert teams away from prying eyes clashed with the expansive boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency operations that could be scrutinised by reporters, Pentagon higher-ups, politicians and Nato allies. McChrystal’s methods weren’t popular with the people ...”

“... corrective effect of making the (male) reader examine his automatic prejudices. After all, if Stephen Crane who had never heard a shot fired in anger could write The Red Badge of Courage from 30-year-old newspaper reports, why can’t the definitive Vietnam account be written by a sympathetic woman who has listened carefully to a lot of witnesses over a ...”

“... in this context is the ability to detect subtle changes of attitude on the other side, small cracks in the wall of Arab hostility surrounding Israel which might provide an opening for accommodation and peace. As Yehoshafat Harkabi, the outspokenly dovish former head of military intelligence, observed, ‘knowing your enemy’ must include the ...”

“... be able to control the content of the canon is merely an extension of this error: it is only a small step from the belief that criticism should treat literature as if it were reducible to a single set of ideas to the phantasy that someone could actually make it so. Conspiracy-theory thinking assumes that the world is exceptionally well-organised and ...”

“... Poirierian nihilism; Poirier’s rigorous writing off (of) the self sends me back, by recoil, to Stephen Whicher’s simplified but accurate three-stage model for Emerson’s spiritual career: transcendental self-reliance; sceptical experience; nihilistic fate and power. True, the three phases mix and mingle at every moment, but the tendency is as Whicher ...”

“... from different religious backgrounds, and when, oh when will she get her period? Margaret joins a small band of girls at school called the Pre-Teen Sensations, who promise to tell each other everything about menstruation, just as soon as it occurs – this enables Blume to describe it from a girl’s-eye (rather than doctor’s-eye or ...”

“... Ionce​ witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh ...”

“... in the Equality Act means ‘biological sex’. Two trans people applied to intervene (Professor Stephen Whittle and Victoria McCloud, a former judge), hoping to give a sense of what the case might mean for individuals in their situation, but only Amnesty International was given the opportunity to make the human rights argument, and its perspective was ...”

“... expression of this view occurred in a recent letter to the London Review of Books. Its writer, Mr Stephen Logan, elegantly transforms Eliot’s parenthetic observation that ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent’ into a pronouncement that intelligence is ‘largely a matter of perceiving the disabling restrictions of method’. I doubt whether ...”

“... two of the city’s homeless street boys who are also chance witnesses to the violence. Certain small details echo, rather inconsequentially, through the three sections: each begins with a reference to colour; a cat, killed by the gangsters, is later discovered by the street boys, who also puncture the tyres on the car driven by Rosa’s husband. But what ...”

“... I always saw those bull-necked fat pigs – like Georg Grosz’s pictures – attacking the small, childlike Vietnamese.’ This was a sort of ‘anti-racist’ response. Another American says: ‘Ours was the sane response. One of total outrage. Not to be outraged was more insane than to be outraged and go bananas.’ This reckless willingness to go ...”

“... culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and times. Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s style ...”

“... an awkward triangle (first time as romance comedy, second time as painful farce) with his friends Stephen and Natasha Spender, he proposed marriage almost simultaneously to three different women. Women fought over his remains, his private secretary unsuccessfully contesting the will he had changed so often. The title of his final novel, Playback, could be ...”