“... uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism. On our map, there are no compass-points. North, for instance, does not mean good. *** We say to France: AUT TACE AUT LOQUERE MELIORA SILENTIO – either shut up or say something worth saying. A Poem against Barn Owls Some people think that barn owls Are an endangered species. But they are found all ...”

“... about – in the parlance of creative writing schools – what they “know”.’ She quotes John Gardner saying that ‘great writers tell the truth exactly – and get it right.’ But, she says, ‘for the modern British – more to the point, English – novelist, this notion of truth is a little obscured and inaccessible.’ Historical novels and ...”

“... Pietro Germi, Anatole Litvak, Jean Painlevé, Gillo Pontecorvo, Nicholas Roeg, George Rouquier, John Schlesinger, Henri Storck, John Sturges and Arne Sucksdorff. And what are we to make of those who are mentioned in the text, but not favoured with individual entries? Pioneers like the Lumière brothers; veterans like ...”

“... I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles ...”

“... but, at the same time, there was a backlash over plans to build a university campus on the north side of the river. People were saying: “Hang on, if you do that there will never be a shipyard on the Wear again.” And it was bonkers, because the shipyards had gone for ever, but there was this reluctance to leave them behind.’The ...”

“... Empire. Their ideas were no less hierarchical and authoritarian than those of George III and Lord North ... had Burke been in office during the American Revolution, we might merely have had to antedate his counter-revolutionary Toryism by some twenty years.’ This was a reference to Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in certain ...”

“... chronology. Each chapter doubles back and forth among the centuries. You no sooner settle to North American women pretend-naives of circa 1845 than the next paragraph knocks you back to 17th-century Ravenna. The hypothesis is unavoidable that Ms Greer committed her researches to a card index in which some natural catastrophe shuffled the entries and ...”

“... of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a lord mayor.) He was tall and, if not quite clean-cut, skinny. He looked as if he would converse by shuffling his large feet and muttering ‘Aw, shucks’. (Thus kids muttered in novels of the period. What they said ...”

“... Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson seems not to have attempted to reason with the great man on this occasion. Such high matters were ...”

“... hasn’t yet looked into the extent of this practice.As children of the spied-on, my brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped (they divorced when we were young). My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of SDS, and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the ...”

“... of Arados, Tripoli, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre. In 814, settlers from Tyre founded Carthage in North Africa, which would later become an imperial power in its own right, claiming its own ‘Phoenician’ empire. By 332, the idea of Phoenicia in the east came to an end as these cities were conquered by Alexander. Carthage fell to Rome in 146, and was ...”

“... traditions: Southampton, Plymouth, Derby and Bolton, for example. They are a little weaker in the North but not much. The Tories did well in Wales, where they won 11 seats, taking two from Labour and one from the Lib Dems – part of a process by which Wales is becoming assimilated into English politics. And they made remarkable gains in former Lib Dem areas ...”

“... last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five ...”

“... believed the Arctic must be a hell, others believed it must be a heaven. Roger Bacon thought that north beyond a rim of ice at the Arctic Circle was a paradise where flourished the Hyperboreans: ‘a very happy race, which dies only from satiety of life, attaining which it casts itself from a lofty rock into the sea’. For many centuries the Arctic has been ...”

“... own terms. Otherwise, the bulk of the profession, oriented largely towards the West – Europe and North America – is only slightly less parochial than the society from which it is recruited. Unsurprisingly, historians seemed much better equipped during earlier moments of rapid flux and uncertainty – 1914, 1939, 1989-91 – to participate in public debate ...”