“... role in history, or at any rate in political and military history, which is the preserve of small elites: people do not make history – they make a living.’ Did the masses clamour for the world wars in which they were to be slaughtered? he asks rhetorically. This question might have a different answer, of course, if one substituted ‘revolution and ...”

“... was first published in the Morning Chronicle in March 1812, anonymously. The poem caused a small uproar at the time, but when he re-published it in February 1814 under his own name (among a group of short poems he printed with The Corsair) the effect was explosive. The ‘meaning’ of the poem had changed with the change of format and its attendant ...”

“... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...”

“... civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.’ Small groups can carry out sectarian assassinations that provoke reprisals and counter-reprisals. Protestant paramilitary groups currently have the reputation of being criminalised, with heavy involvement in the drug trade, and of being infiltrated by the police ...”

“... songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly longing for things unseen.Yet something about my fixation has ...”

“... social encounters in public spaces. This was a turn to a different modernism: the sort embodied in Stephen Dedalus’s definition of God as ‘a shout in the street’; the sort that celebrated spontaneity, improvisation and play. For half a century, Jacobs’s humane perspective has leavened the discourse of urban revitalisation while at the same time ...”

“... the late 1980s, the child and adolescent psychiatrist Domenico Di Ceglie became interested in the small number of gender-diverse children who appeared at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in South London. Most had been born male and were still living as feminine boys. He developed a minor clinical speciality in their treatment and, in ...”

“... humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen Spender as ‘a literary mover and shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his ...”

“... eyes. Nor should it be thought such metaphysical transports are confined to their two books, or to small coteries of addicts. Plenty of others were on the trail in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in France. They included Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal ...”

“... featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show … He gets kicked off in ...”

“... hard for little reward. The profits of their labour, and the taxes they pay, go to support a small number of lazy, arrogant rich people who live in big houses, wallow in luxury, and have no need to work. Any attempt to resist, let alone change, this unjust system is crushed by the weight of a vast private-public bureaucracy, encompassing the police, the ...”

“... keeper’ even conditioned their first appearance. In 1609, late in the dramatist’s career, a small volume called ‘SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS’ came into print, with a dedicatory page so curious that it has been used, from at least the earlier 19th century, to throw light on poems found obscure or simply not read for a hundred years or more before ...”

“... some understanding of his health problems, such as they were. Some of the letters from Italy are small masterpieces of description; they are alert and sensitive and full of astute judgments. Sometimes, too, James is funny, irreverent and outspoken, especially in his letters to his family but also to literary friends from Newport and Boston such as Thomas ...”

“... famous, because the 7/7 bombers blew up a bus directly outside). The editorial office was one small book-and-paper-suffocated room, with four of us in it: Karl, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Susannah Clapp and me. Even that staffing level sounds more lavish than it was, because Karl split his time with his other job as Northcliffe Professor of Modern English ...”

“... dignified, easy-paced, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called Primeval Forest by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the Nation on food stamps. Like many American poets inspired by open-field poetics – the monologues, essays and never-ending exchanges of ...”