“... shtarker (Yiddish: strong man, strong arm) – gangster; hard man Yiddish, it turns out, has not said its last word: it is still involved in the business of coinages and slippages. Live Yiddish is the happy invention of this novel. And it is an invention that necessitates, and is caused by, an outlandish back story: an atom bomb fell on Berlin in 1946; the ...”

“... victory salutes were traded in for some fireside modesty. ‘In the years to come,’ he said once, ‘people may decide that we went about things in the worst possible way, that we got it all wrong. We’ll just have to see.’ But with Walesa there was always the likelihood of a flip retort, a quick get-out for a man who had spent his life trying ...”

“... does, but a book ought the more to care about distinguishing such lightness from airiness:   Edward Young’s Night Thoughts were hugely successful at the time but are forgotten now, although occasionally there is some academic attempt to revive interest in them by placing them in their context, etc. The selection here provided is enough to show that ...”

“... in the form of concrete poetry, for the accompanying catalogue, which was designed by IG member Edward Wright (who went on to create Scotland Yard’s revolving sign). It was this spiral bound scrapbook, with a cobalt blue cover and cheap offset lithography, that made Richard Hollis want to be a graphic designer. Wright’s cultural references, Hollis ...”

“... and asked that the shawl he had given her should be buried with her. Her passion for Byron, she said, burned out and left nothing but waste and ash; her love for Shelley, about which she said next to nothing, survived the Byron episode and persisted. Flexibility about names suggests concealment of origins and uncertainty ...”

“... almost every summer for the previous six years: it was the ‘new normal’, people in Ashland said, an effect of climate change. The publisher was moving to Los Angeles, a metropolis once famed for its smog, partly because the air there was sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly ...”

“... Rose’s Kierkegaard lectures at the University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her ...”

“... on other conceivably kindred disabilities. Although the term itself is of American origin and is said to have originated in the milieu of American ego-psychology, it is not in that context that Leader ultimately finds comfort and counsel. He has a chapter on Freud (writing considered as a transgression, the blocked writer as a victim of powerful ...”

“... own curiosity. He argued in much the same terms as the animal rights groups today: he knew, he said, of no discovery resulting from vivisection by which any illness could be more easily cured. These practices, moreover, ‘harden the heart, extinguish those sensations which give man confidence in man, and make physicians more dreadful than gout or ...”

“... What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also defends for their historical interest, relishing for example in The Spiral Ascent the word and the concept ‘poshocrat’. Like all Bagshaw-type historians, both Kermode and Cobb delight not only in the objects but in the attitudes ...”

“... dispatched him off to the Shah’s latest refuge in the Bahamas under the false name of ‘Edward Wilson’; Sir Denis, writes Shawcross, was a director of Shell and did not want the company’s name mixed up in his visit to the Shah: After a brief exchange of courtesies, ‘Wilson’ explained to the Shah that ‘Her Majesty’s Government has ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... away into the woods. The naked boy speaks like an Etonian. ‘“They are very nice woods,” said the boy, with a touch of patronage in his voice.’ And then: ‘It’s quite two months since I tasted child flesh.’ Saki wrote in the vernacular of the drawing room but with the ruthlessness of an avenging prophet. A.A. Milne wrote in an early ...”

“... fall,’ they thought. It was in many ways a book for its time. Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was ...”

“... Indeed it was Baldwin’s conciliatory attitude that ended the strike so peacefully. Then it is said that Baldwin was responsible for large-scale unemployment – nothing like as great as under the most recent Labour government. Baldwin was an appeaser. To the best of my recollection, we in the Labour Party were for appeasement and we condemned Baldwin for ...”