“... that promoted the acceptability of homosexuality – was not as straightforwardly prejudiced as it may have seemed. It was dressed up at the time as an attempt to defend the integrity of the traditional family unit and the Christian values associated with it. But the matter at hand was not, for Thatcher, primarily about sexuality. Rather, it reflected her ...”

“... also true that the fairies’ calendar is bound somehow to our own. Fairies are said to appear on May Day or Hallowmas, or at certain times of day: twilight or midnight. The time of the full moon appears to be important to them. According to Robert Kirk, the 17th-century minister and author of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, which ...”

“... system Lansley wants it to be. The way it works, crudely speaking, is this. Every so often – it may be every year, or every two or three – the Department of Health is asked to make its pitch to the Treasury for the amount of money it thinks it should get from the overall tax pot, and then is told how much it will actually get. Most of the money comes from ...”

“... break into aphoristic fragments, burst into song. Keep your mind in hell and despair not; you may be weaker than the whole world, but you are always stronger than yourself: it’s fine to read Love’s Work and its epigrams as good advice for living in extremis, but they also illustrate an approach to logic, speculation, dialectics.Commodity ...”

“... huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times announced, ‘may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet.’ There is no evidence that Wilde went home to his wife and children on his return from Algiers: he seems to have remained in various hotels in London. Around 17 February he ...”

“... forces in South Ossetia that this was an ‘operation to restore constitutional order’.) In May 2004, Tbilisi reasserted control over the Adjara region on the Black Sea coast, run as a fiefdom by the Moscow-backed Aslan Abashidze. Saakashvili made his first moves in South Ossetia soon after, by forcibly closing the Ergneti market – a hub for trade in ...”

“... with the doors and windows open for some cool air. I can hear bombing in the north; more people may be dying as I write this. The death toll is climbing on both sides, but the number of Israeli and Palestinian fatalities can’t be compared. Fourteen Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians this year, two by rockets fired from the Gaza Strip and ...”

“... characters’ lack of self-awareness, their bad judgment, their blind hypocrisy. Honest readers may conclude that they are not so very different themselves; when the feeling of superiority wears off, satire occasionally gives rise to sympathy. Rakoff tries the same thing, but hers is a more anxious novel than McCarthy’s, more ambivalent, and thus much ...”

“... that has so maddened many reviewers. On the face of it, a list of quoted sources that one may or may not have spotted in the text looks like a calculated affront to the average reader. In fact – and this might not improve matters for some – the ploy and the precise opening words of the postscript are borrowed ...”

“... and citizens of the same state. Tel Aviv University showed the power of its imagination when, in May 2008, the student council decided to hold the fun and enjoyable annual Day of the Student on the exact day that Palestinians commemorate the Naqba. The excuse given by the student council was that ‘we were not told of the problematic timing of the ...”

“... writer has his shadows, and by middle age we know these counterlives are part of us. For some, it may be a dead father still stalking their prose. Forster spoke of his mother, standing in that house on the margins of Stevenage, surrounded by all her plates and her shawls, waiting for him. But the media age has brought those shades from places we haven’t ...”

“... must be there, because you can feel them and you are even pretty sure that you can see them. You may also believe that your home or furniture is infested, but you may be the only one who knows they are there. No one seems to think they exist except you. Nothing seems to get rid of them. So what are they? University of ...”

“... everyone that he has pure Arabic blood [apparently Klee had let slip that his mother’s family may have come originally from North Africa], but is a typical Galician Jew. He paints ever more madly, he bluffs and bewilders [er blufft und verblüfft], his students are gaping with wide-open eyes and mouths, a new, unheard-of art makes its entrance in the ...”

“... those furthest from sea routes, were divided into small chieftaincies headed by men who may or may not have been direct descendants of the Mycenaean ruling elites. Agrarian wealth was limited and they secured their power by beating up the neighbours and helping themselves to flocks, crops and women. They ruled on ...”

“... cup of tea gazing at a typewriter. No one has suggested the lady-writer with knitting shot. It may be that they dared not. The knitting me wasn’t an image I thought sat well with what I wrote – or anything about me. I feared in the minds of others a Jenny version of ‘Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia knits!’ But not long ago, Julia Gillard, then prime ...”