“... as ‘a businessman with a sense of history’, spiels his pitch as the oligarch’s gin-palace powers under Tower Bridge. Thirty years on and he could be making his final plea as a candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle ...”

“... thing, Johnson seldom complacent, least of all on such a point. Asked why Europe is granted its powers, Imlac’s reply, here also avowedly Johnson’s, literally means ‘God only knows,’ with some of the ironic puzzlement that idiomatically belongs to that usage. The assertion of European superiority may not be quite what it seems Imlac’s ‘because ...”

“... decline of belief in hell, and in the afterlife more generally, and thus in God’s supernatural powers and promises. Casey is not without his own excellent Pelagian stolidity, and original sin and total depravity bring forth his most stirring denunciations. He happily lays into Augustine and Calvin (and folds the cheerless Cardinal Newman into the mix). As ...”

“... to the microphone of a loudspeaker. Hamas’s victory was greeted with a diplomatic boycott by the powers that had urged democracy on the Palestinian people, along with efforts to ‘bolster’ Abbas and, ultimately, to foment civil war between Hamas and Fatah. The West responded this way to the elected government of Hamas because it refuses to renounce ...”

“... by a poet called Donagh MacDonagh, otherwise known as the national orphan, since his father, Thomas MacDonagh, had been executed by the British for his part in the 1916 Rebellion. Later O’Brien paid a visit to Joyce’s father, then living in Drumcondra, where the best English is spoken, who was partly bedridden and expressed the view that his son ...”

“... ready to return to Dublin and the humblest employment; but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis ...”

“... By the time I got to Belfast and phoned him again the line was dead. 13. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, a known figure in the IRA, was gunned down at his home on 19 March 1920. The late-night callers were three members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. One of them was later identified as District-Inspector Oswald Swanzy. The Chief Secretary for ...”

“... in his work, is no longer incompatible with individualism, with self-consciousness about the powers and limits of language, or awareness of the transformative role of the secular artist. In fashioning these paradigms, modes of consciousness and roles for himself, Tagore seems to be addressing, instructing and even rebutting not a Brahmin, but a bourgeois ...”

“... this key. And in a certain phase of life – with male adolescents it may come from a reading of Thomas Wolfe – the gratification of such writing can be immense. How much of Agee is like this? Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the most ambitious and fully worked of his books, and the solemnities of diction, circumstantial proofs of localism, and care ...”

“... the wars between Connaught and Ulster, translated by Lady Gregory in 1902 and decades later by Thomas Kinsella, which became an Iliad for independent Ireland. It is given a place of honour at the start of The Field Day Anthology. As a vision of the four green fields, however, it is divisive and gory. Was Kinsella anticipating the Troubles when he published ...”

“... of souvenirs, ‘snapshots’, that his art had allegedly become. If the ‘progress of his powers’ as an artist – Wordsworth’s words for what is recorded in The Prelude – may be thought to have taken these turns, the progress of Lowell’s life brought hard work, fame, and an alternation of domesticity and escape. The breakdowns were for long ...”

“... to record the aesthetic’. In his seventies he was still taking up an old worry about his own powers of seeing. In a note ‘inspired’ by Woolf’s posthumous A Writer’s Diary, he laments: ‘The beauties the beauties the things I let go by.’ No one should approach Forster’s diaries, now published in full for the first time, with any expectation ...”

“... and virtually untouchable acquis, and a decreasing connection to public feeling, was expanding its powers at the expense of national parliaments. The truth was that ‘the EU began as an oligarchy, it continues oligarchic, and the oligarchs see no reason to alter their practices or their ambitions. No previous empire I can think of, certainly not that of the ...”

“... damaging yourself.’Suppose a philosopher, in her middle forties, is working at the height of her powers, with The Broken Middle (1992), the book she saw as her greatest achievement, just published. In February 1993, she delivers a triumphant inaugural lecture, ‘Athens and Jerusalem – A Tale of Three Cities’, at the University of Warwick, where she has ...”

“... massacres of 1994: she downplayed the genocidal aspect in favour of ‘the role played by outside powers’, and accused ‘aid agencies’ of ‘building prisons’ instead of bringing in food and medical help. Aid agencies, unsurprisingly, objected; Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan, did some digging and discovered that Foster is really Fiona Fox. Her ...”