“... end, his affection for his friend Arnaud, to whom he recommends the shirtmaker – the circle does close. Asked by Edward Hirsch, who interviewed him for the Paris Review, how he ‘hit upon’ his ‘distinctive, beautiful and implacable’ prose style, Salter answered tersely, almost evasively: ‘I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyse ...”

“... lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served Stewart extremely well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode ...”

“... any given age, according to whether the ‘sign’ and the ‘thing’ are perceived as distant, close, contained within each other, excluded from each other, parodying each other, and so on. And there will be a trope for each. But all these tropes, for Foucault himself, are part of a vast historical catachresis, a bacchanal of misnaming, a naivety without ...”

“... and b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility’. It is as frank and, at the same time, as delicately worded an attempt at ‘presenting himself as an advocate of SWE’s utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority’ as possible. Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, a number of students on the receiving end ...”

“... him is power relations, policy struggles, and the competing claims on the nation. Bew pays close attention to the preoccupation of many Victorian intellectuals with Ireland, and deals with the ideas of Mill and others without falling into the jejeune generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James ...”

“... was Amílcar Cabral, who led Guinea-Bissau’s revolt against Portuguese colonialism. He was a close ally of Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana. A few weeks after the conference in Havana, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup. He had become an unpopular and authoritarian ruler, but there were rumours that the CIA had a hand in his downfall, unhappy ...”

“... time was with Lenin. His writings had made him a hero to socialist intellectuals, and he remained close to the Bolsheviks while living in exile on Capri after 1906. In 1913 he returned to Russia, and a few years later observed with admiration the Bolshevik destruction of tsarist autocracy, but by then his friendship with Lenin had become a catastrophe of ...”

“... metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small partition. The idea of what it might be like to be here all day and night, cooped up with another person, was fully palpable.The jail was temporarily open ...”

“... they are construction workers, possibly Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is. The tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole digging; the throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along the murky waterways. A new development calling itself Adelaide Wharf, and ...”

“... historian Bernhard Schwertfeger called in 1929 ‘the world war of the documents’. Renouvin was close to Raymond Poincaré, president of France between 1913 and 1920 and prime minister intermittently during the 1920s. After the cessation of hostilities, Poincaré’s record in office came under hostile scrutiny from French historians, most of them men of ...”

“... knowledge of his subsequent work.It has often been argued by hostile commentators – among them, Frank Lentricchia – that deconstruction is just a species of ‘textualist’ mystification, a last-ditch retreat from politics and history into the realm of evasive rhetorical strategies. Now this charge has a certain plausibility when applied to those early ...”

“... sexual fantasies about his sister cover many pages of the novel. His chosen way of feeling close to her is to imagine and simulate her sexual pleasure, to let himself be penetrated by a succession of rent boys and casual male lovers. When young men are not around, he can impale himself on a smooth tree branch or – in one revolting scene – a sausage ...”

“... before Dürer died, Lorck drew a severe portrait of his great predecessor. He emulated Dürer’s close scrutiny of his subjects, but he also had a quirky, even comic imagination and a taste for odd juxtapositions and discrepancies of scale. In a superb sketch in chalk on blue paper, held in the prints and drawings collection of the British Museum, a large ...”

“... the decade after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on ...”

“... a sort of Shakespearian lack of differentiation. Yet at the same time it is a mystique which lies close to the heart of Kipling’s method, and gives it that unique reality/unreality blend which is so hypnotically effective. Kipling’s method makes details of living larger than life, and memorable for that reason, but at the same time its emphasis ...”